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Revision as of 12:49, 16 September 2006 editKehrli (talk | contribs)834 edits physical quantities← Previous edit Revision as of 21:53, 16 September 2006 edit undoRbj (talk | contribs)3,805 edits physical quantitiesNext edit →
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:''The value of a physical quantity can be expressed as the product of a numerical value and a unit: physical quantity = numerical value x unit.'' :''The value of a physical quantity can be expressed as the product of a numerical value and a unit: physical quantity = numerical value x unit.''
So I hope you agree that this makes it clear that the product n*U is the value of Q and not n, and that all our dispute was only a matter of different terminology. --] 12:49, 16 September 2006 (UTC) So I hope you agree that this makes it clear that the product n*U is the value of Q and not n, and that all our dispute was only a matter of different terminology. --] 12:49, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

: this is a content dispute. unlike the MS, which appears to me to be a dispute of ''convention'', this is a substantive content dispute, neither of us are wanting to dicreetly ask the other for clarification. both are confident of the correctness of each respective position. the discussion of the content of an article should be on that article's talk page and every editor with an interest or investment gets to participate, input other perspectives, and decide what is their own position. if it comes down to it editors vote if no ''rough'' consensus is reached. so i'm taking it from there. but i'm not rehashing every point. i have a life outside WP and the internet and i don't have the time.] 21:53, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Revision as of 21:53, 16 September 2006

Gravitomagnetism

I reverted your manual move of Gravitomagnetism to Gravitoelectromagnetism. You should always use move to rename an article. As both articles already exist, a simple move is no longer possible. You must ask an administrator for assistance.

I do not oppose the renaming. The issue should however first be discussed on the talk page, or we will once again end up with a rename war, or worse yet, two duplicate articles. Petri Krohn 23:43, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Greetings

I see that no one has bothered to say "hello" yet, and so, the stock greeting:


Welcome!

Hello, Rbj, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! 

---

Next, if you need help, please turn to the talk pages associated with Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Physics. I agree with you and Hillman, and 90% of the rest of the crowd here) that "gravitoelectromagnetism" is the right name. I find most of the debate quite silly, in fact. However, engaging in cut-n-paste moves is a bad idea. There are several admins who hang out at wikiproject physics, and perhaps one of them can just plain clean up the mess. linas 01:39, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply; I will answer here, instead of on my page. I was trying to be helpful. Several remarks:
1) Your userpage is blank, which makes it hard to get any impression of who you are. You should crete at least something that says who you are and what you do; this will help you in your various conversatins and encounters with others. People will take you more seriously when you have a user page, and even moreso if its impressive.
2) You should add your name to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Physics/Participants. I see by your edit history that you are active, and am surpised that we haven't met before, as we have some common interests.
3) I agree that there are a fair number of immature and/or socially mal-adept types here. These people are particularly painful when they start editing science topics about which they know damn little about, and yet feel free to argue with hte pro's. Yes, User:Nixer should be ashamed of himself, ... which brings me to the next point:
4) You can and should make appeals and ask for assistance at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Physics and/or Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Mathematics. These ages are watched by hundreds, among them a variety of admins who also happen to be specialists in a wide range of physics/math fields (including grad studens and professors, or, like me, PhD's fallen by the waysides.) Misplaced Pages is a community, and that's the point: draw on the community and help the community. You don't need to fight the silly battles all by yourself. linas 19:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Chris Hillman

Mathematician by training, not a physicist :-/ CH 04:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Welcome back!

I hope you're time away has been relaxing and that your return may be not as stressful as your previous expriences. mennonot 23:19, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

we'll see. i dunno how crapped up the excommunication article is, but i haven't looked at it for 2 months. Rbj 00:53, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I think when we stand up to Ana. it is the best way to handle her/him. After he/she started editing I stopped editing anything for almost a month and figured he/she'd have been kicked out, forgot about it by then. When I came back, I looked at how other editors handle her on the other pages and the only way to deal w. is by not letting ana. dictate. It is important that the information remain truthful, their are school children doing projects on Mennonites etc. Stettlerj 15:58, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Excommunication Article

Tim, i edited the Excommunication article, tried to preserve some of User:Anacapa's factual stuff while rolling back emotionally laden content. (it is still obvious to me that she's got some axe to grind.) anyway, i really think it should be pruned, but am hesitant to do more myself because any more pruning by me would be exclusively of Anacapa's influence and not mine and she might perceive that as unfair. anyway, might you look at it and do to it what you think keeps it objective without having more detail/content than is appropriate for 1/10 % of Christendom that are Anabaptists. BTW, thanks for welcoming me "back". Rbj 03:25, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your message. Its good to see your back editing. I share your concern about cleaning up the Excommunication article. I think its especially helpful to add the umbrella Anabaptist section. However, I think its important to recognise that this is a sensitive section of the article on which there has been quite a number of reverts in the past two months. Although I haven't been involved in this, I see that there appears to be an open discussion on this section here: Talk:Excommunication#Suggested criteria for the Amish/Mennonite/Hutterite section. I'd suggest joining that discussion before making major changes to the article. It looks like there are a number of specific issues on the table that relate to the Anabaptist section. In a similiar situation with the Mennonite article, I found that discussing revisions before hand can save a lot of frustration and edit wars afterwards.
One other concern is the use of the edit summary field. I'm not sure how helpful it is to use these summaries to accuse another user by name. I think it might be more helpful to simply say something like "NPOVing" and explain what and why you're doing it on the talk page. Whereas if accusations are made in the edit summary the accused may feel they need to revert to save face and defend themselves in the edit summaries.
That said, thanks for your ongoing efforts to clean up articles and make them more NPOV. I think its important to have a variety of perspectives contributing. So let's do it in a way that invites everyone into the process. mennonot 22:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

What is a human flea?

The article Flea states: "Some well known flea species include: * Human flea (Pulex irritans), ". --Lambiam 18:44, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

A break from the mundane...

Hello, Robert. There's this crazy idea I've been toying with for a while now. I've discovered a technique/algorithm which, although already known by a few companies, is generally kept secret (thus many companies have ineffective solutions). Have any ideas on how might I "publish" my method to make it publicly known?

The technique/algorithm in question is a very simple, highly generalised method of implementing a PDC (plugin delay compensation) system for most multi-track software. So, using this method, one could implement a PDC system for Cubase which also works for group tracks (admittedly, I've been too lazy/unmotivated to do it for the particular case, but I have worked out the new FL Studio mixer entirely, which is how I ended up discovering this generalised method). Do you have any advice? Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 18:31, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay. Well, I haven't written a documeu detailing the general method yet but I've written one showing how to apply the general method to Fl Studio 6. Do you have FlS6? Then you can test out the effectiveness of my methods now. Go to and work your way to the Developers Forum. Go to the thread named "A non-native PDC implementation" but don't download anything (just read). Go to the other thread (Accessing the mixer streams) and laugh at me and Didier behaving like idiots.

Then download the newer version of PDCX. It comes with a Friendly Manual and full VC++ sources. See for yourself if it works (which is a lot more than what Didier and Frederic have bothered doing). Note that the method explained in the manual is very outdated and FlS specific. I can't send you the Fl Studio document soon, but in the meantime I could write the generalised one? One thing I learnt from this is that you should not try to force people to accept charity (and Gol sucks!)... Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 08:00, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

i couldn't find posts by Didier (he's not the same as Gol, is he?) but have noticed on the music-dsp mailing list that i had some difficulty explaining some stuff regarding using the FFT and overlap-add to do filtering to one "Didier Dambrin" <didid@skynet.be>.
i do not use a PC for much (i have one, but don't use it much). i like my Mac. so i don't have or run FLStudio. i do not know what the issue is or what it is your plugin is trying to solve. is it regarding the well-known and loathed PC audio latency issue? i always thought that that was a interrupt priority and service problem that could only be dealt with using very low-level code techniques that PC geeks could do. is your plug about something else? i really can't understand from the context of those threads (and i did find them, i just don't know for sure what you guys are talking about). r b-j 04:35, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
is your issue about the misalignment that happens when a plug-in with some sprurious but known delay processes some audio on one track that that delays it relative to the other tracks? in Pro Tools, we had this problem with the Wave Mechanics (now SoundToys) Pitch Doctor. it had 89 ms of delay (so that it could really get an accurate and secure determination of the pitch) and people had to manually advance the output of that by nudging it to the left 9 times (10 ms per nudge). Digidesign had a value that we could write to that would inform them of the delay of the plug-in (assumedly to allow them to compensate for the plug-in delay when aligning tracks) but they didn't make use of it. i thought that was really dumb.
is your discussion about this? otherwise, i can't tell what the issue is. r b-j 04:47, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, they are the same person; and that is what the plugins do (non-natively, believe it or not). You put certain plugins in certain mixer tracks and tell them the latencies and routings of the mixer. The PDCX system analyses the data and decides where to put delays in order to get the system back in sync to compensate for the plugin(s) latencies. This works no matter where in the mixer the offending plugins are (but PDCX was designed for the less flexible Fl5 mixer).

What people don't seem to get for some arcane reason is that if an outside party like myself could do this non-natively using external plugins then there's no reason why Fl Studio shouldn't have a native version. Even if you don't use a PC you can still download the zip and examine the manual. It explains what PDC is and also given the (outdated) algorithm used by the system (and it's a bit easier to follow than your filter paper...). Okay, decided - I'll start writing the generalised document. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 05:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and there's no need to nudge anything either. The system applies the correct delays to the appropriate audio tracks automatically. As far as I know, Logic is the only software which (it is claimed) has a 100% complete automatic PDC system (although I hear there was a slight problem with MIDI getting out of sync with the audio). Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 06:02, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

AfD's, Sinc normalized, etc

Rather than blanking the pages and taking them to AfD, the proper (easier) place is Redirects for Deletion. Fan1967 18:56, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Hey From New Hampshire

Thanks, rbj. Ditto for you too, buddy. :-) Karmafist 21:10, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

A distorted sense of reality

Sorry to bother you again, but I have a few very simple questions this time around. Sony Distortion, one of the crappy plugins that come with Sound Forge, has a slew-rate slider which results in a very weird sounding effect. Allegedly real solid-state distorters do this. How is it simulated? Also, is there a fast way of creating fuzz distortion in a plugin (and how does it happen in hardware)? Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 23:26, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

of course, not being with Sony, i don't know what they're doing, but from the name, it sounds like they first apply a differentiator, then clip at a level defined by the slider, then integrate the result. just a guess. r b-j 04:01, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that does sort of sound like it can limit the rate of change of the sound (all those Sound Forge plugins are really terrible, btw). Thanks. And fuzz? Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 07:33, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Zero and First Order Holds

I'm sorry, I guess I was unclear and I may have misinterpreted your intentions. What I meant was that you can do the things that you wanted to do (create separate articles with more appropriate names) without deleting the article, so there is no reason to bring the matter to AfD, which is only for discussing deletion and not the splitting off of articles. It's good to make a comment on the talk page to see if anyone objects, but you don't need anyone's permission to do it. When separate articles are created, simply redirect Zero and First Order Holds to one of them. I got the impression that you intended to use some of the article's content for creating the separate articles. In this case, the article would need to be kept to preserve attribution under the GFDL. In this situation, the best course of action would probably be to move the article to the name of the article that will receive the most content (such as zero-order hold) and proceed to rewrite it. If your intent was to delete the article without using any content from it whatsoever, then AfD would be the appropriate venue. If this is the case, let me know and I can reopen the nomination. It would probably be good to clarify this in the nomination. The article having the wrong name or being split up is irrelevant to making a case for deletion, since the article can be renamed and split up without deleting it. Sorry for the confusion. -- Kjkolb 03:52, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to rush you, but I'm going to be away from the computer shortly, so if you would like me to reopen the nomination, please let me know quickly. Thanks, Kjkolb 04:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm back (though I'll probably go to sleep soon). I forgot to answer all of your questions. There are standard templates (for the top and bottom) that are used to close AfD nominations, so it will say the result of the debate was this or that even if there was no debate. It is common to close a nomination immediately if it is believed to be unnecessary and for other reasons, such as an article that qualifies for speedy deletion or a bad faith nomination. I suppose that you could call my action a "speedy keep". I avoid using that term because, in my opinion, it implies bad faith on the part of the nominator. Talk to you later, Kjkolb 08:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
i guess i went to bed after leaving the note and just now am reading your response. i don't think you misinterpreted my intentions. my intention then as it is now is to delete that article because it is poorly titled, poorly written, and has technical error. it should not exist, but the accurate content that is for ZOH should go into a Zero-order hold article and the content that would be accurate for FOH should go into a First-order hold article. there is no good reason for that article to exist.
if i were to redirect it, what article shall i redirect it toward? Zero-order hold or the not yet existing First-order hold? problem is that since a more general concept is redirected toward something more specific and either ZOH or FOH will get dropped in the redirect. The article should be deleted. it was poorly conceived in the first place. no article refers to it. deleting it will be the best way to keep the quality of WP up. r b-j 21:42, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
So you are going to use some content from the article? That means that it cannot be deleted. If separate articles were written from scratch, it could go to AfD, but not if any content from the article is used. It must be kept as a redirect to preserve attribution in the history under the GDFL. Some redirects are made so that content can be more easily found, but some are made to preserve attribution. It doesn't matter if the redirect is useless for people looking for an article. The page should redirect to the article that got the most content from it, even if the redirect is illogical. However, any links to the old article will have to be changed so that the redirect is not used to direct them to the wrong article. -- Kjkolb 01:50, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
i probably will not use any content from that article (User:Petr.adamek is helping me by making simpler and very clear drawings for illustration so even the one drawing i thought i might use will not be necessary). but even if i were to move or duplicate some content, what difference does that make. this is like someone creating an article William and Hillary Clinton (i am assuming that will be a red link, it really should be if it isn't) and doing a biography of both of these persons in one article. they both should get their own article and have links to the other.
there is enough bad writing in that article and enough technical error, that i would just blank the damn thing (because it is not helpful regarding the transmission of knowledge which is what we are here for) but am afraid that someone will take it the wrong way and some admin might block me. r b-j 02:09, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I put a disputed tag on it for now, so hopefully people won't be misled before it is deleted. I'll renominate it for deletion. If you do end up using any of the content, let me know or post a comment on the nomination and the article will be redirected to preserve attribution. Thanks, Kjkolb 02:45, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
i moved the tag to a {{sectfact}} tag for the FOH section. as indicated in the talk page, i might have come upon some obscure source that supports the given definition for FOH, but it should be called predictive FOH. i'll investigate this and, if there is some meat in it, i'll include a section for in in the new First-order hold, when i can get the drawings. forgot to mention to you, Kjkolb: thanks for your attention to this. i think one way or another, we'll get this right. r b-j 17:53, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

How to purge

Sorry I was a bit brief. I will describe how to purge the server's cache below. You may have to do it many times to get the images to display, and be patient because it won't always work immediately.

How to purge:

  1. Go to the image page
  2. Click on the "History" tab
  3. The url in your browser will now end in &action=history. Change that to &action=purge and hit enter. This will purge the image.

Example: Image:Firstorderhold.signal.png

  1. Go to Image:Firstorderhold.signal.png
  2. Click on the History tab
  3. Change the url to this and hit enter

About the Commons, it is not essential, but if you wanted to upload there in the future you just create an account there, and click "Upload file" on the left (from their Main Page).--Commander Keane 23:44, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

No bother at all, I have deleted the ones you asked me to. Thanks for taking the time to re-name/upload to Commons :-) --Commander Keane 02:31, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

User:Exploding Boy and Homophobia

Rbj - All I can say is that with exploding boy, all I can give is a long, slow shake of the head. He doesn't appear to be very reasonable or academically inclined, so I sort of gave up, and removed any public links I had made to the wiki article. I think it remains unfortunately biased (and therefore not very useful -though there is a lot of good information in there), and exploding boy doesn't seem to get either that a dictionary is not the finite end of knowledge, nor that his attempt to define religious objection to homosexuality implicitly as homophobia is simply not valid. Some of it is no doubt, but some of it is principled objection based on Biblical authority and natural law theory and so on and so forth. Not that I personally agree with those objections (I prefer John Boswell's re-evaluations), but rather I think there are other issues here. I'll be interested to see how this comes down. Do drop me a note if there are developments.

Cor Unum 10:24, 3 July 2006 (UTC)


in regards to the comment you left on my user talk page, I would be glad to help out by standing up against exploding boy, and taking away the bias of the article. --Piemanmoo 01:56, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Welcome back

Nice to see you again. Alain Riazuelo 22:13, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

nice to see you, too. i thought i was leaving for good when what i needed was a wikibreak and to see a little justice (3 of the 4 editors of which 2 were admins that were really jerking me around last December are now gone or desysopped). i've made a reference to your journey throught the Bogdanov universe on the Physics Forums site recently. looks like Igor is occasionally still trying to change the article. i hope that the experts can maintain that page without needed sympathetic bodies to come there and help lift. BTW, John Baez came by the Planck units page (where i did a lot of contributing) and said that, although it's a matter of taste (which units are the most natural) he approved of the article in the state it was in. i still think that units that normalize c {\displaystyle c} , {\displaystyle \hbar } , 4 π G {\displaystyle 4\pi G} , and ϵ 0 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{0}} are the most natural (on the basis of what happens to field equations as a result). r b-j 22:32, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

3RR

Please refrain from undoing other people's edits repeatedly. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing Misplaced Pages under the three-revert rule, which states that nobody may revert an article to a previous version more than three times in 24 hours. (Note: this also means editing the page to reinsert an old edit. If the effect of your actions is to revert back, it qualifies as a revert.) Thank you. abakharev 07:15, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

i dunno what you are talking (or writing) about. if it is about the homophobia article, was not a revert and was not a revert but was editing text in a contentious environment.
was a simple content addition (which EB simply hated but which i can prove was reducing POV in the article) and there were 3 reverts where i stopped and EB didn't, even after i warned him that his next revert would violate 3RR and he took up the challenge and i responded, not by reverting him (which would have been my 4th revert) but by reporting him.
please read Talk:Homophobia to understand what this is about before jumping to conclusions. this whole issue centers around a very simple dispute about content and NPOV of which i am also very confident of what I and 4 other (recent) editors have been trying to do. please check your facts before letting this immature little POV pusher, who thinks he owns the article and who got caught violating 3RR and is now having a little tantrum, lead you astray. check your facts, check the talk page, and check the history. i violated no 3RR regarding homophobia. r b-j 15:41, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
OK, you obviously read ] as well as the WP:3RR policy itself. The whole point of the warning is to make you aware of the policy for the future references. Excessive edit warring is counterproductive. Try to find a compromise yourself. If you feel you are right - argue your case on the talk page instead of reverting and somebody would support your version or find a compromise. If you feel the article attracted a wrong type of editors, who are unable to appreciate your arguments, try to start WP:RfC. If there is a vandalism there try to attract attention of an admin. These methods work, excessive reverting does not.
On the Homophobia you four time inserted the word pejorative or its deviations, despite a strong opposition from the other editors. If you were properly warned it could lead to your blocking (it is unproductive now to say if it would be fair or not), please do not risk it again. abakharev 22:11, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
not in a 24 hour period did i insert the word: perjorative 4 times (unless you count the original content change as one time, in that case, you are correct, but i reverted only 3 times). one of those latter edits, the nasty word "perjorative" existed in the version i was editing and in the version that was a result of the edit, so i didn't insert it there. if you look at the edit history, i have done little editing to the actual article after the little war with Exploder, but a lot of editing to the Talk page, explaining again and again precisely why the word "perjorative" makes the article less POV in the context we were trying to have it. also, it is a falsehood that there was strong opposition from the other editors (such as User:Njamesdebien, User:Mangoe who have been trying to get this fixed for weeks). it is really only User:Exploding Boy who was unwilling to any compromise: he insisted that "Opposition to same-sex activism on religious, moral, or political grounds may also be referred to as homophobia." without any qualification (which is saying that this reference is normative) and all i tried to do was insert one word so that it would be more accurate and less POV: "Opposition to same-sex activism on religious, moral, or political grounds may also be perjoratively referred to as homophobia." where is there the compromise? also, given the definition of the word, which statement is more accurate? r b-j 22:50, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi again...

Sorry to bother you, again again, but could you perhaps take a look at the PDF attached to this and tell me what you think of it (any style mistakes, whether it's clear enough, if you're convinced by it, if the Mathematics is a tad too difficult for some people, how embarrassed I should be by it...)? I hope you don't mind me using your name in the acknowledgements. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 20:23, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

See what I said about needing to feel embarrassed? Where did I get the idea your name was Richard!? It would've been wonderful if the people from the archive had actually told me this before putting the PDF up... Okay, I think I can quickly change it and resubmit. Thanks for your time - this is the reason why I mentioned "your" name. Yes, please, do take your time; I realise that perhaps the method is not really as intuitive as I said it was (but it seems obvious in retrospect, like almost everything else). I probably shouldn't have used so many passive verbs, but I feel that "we" is wrong since there's only one of me and "I" is inappropriate (although I have seen a doctorate thesis on quantum programming use the first person singular extensively), but you can tell me about all that later when you're done. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 08:30, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Linearising an IIR filter through cascading

An intelligent heading, for a change. I've been wondering if it might be possible to construct a linear phase 4-pole/zero IIR filter through this process:

a. make a biquad filter (perhaps using your cookbook)
b. construct an allpass filter with the exact same response as the filter
c. invert the phase response of the allpass filter (swap poles and zeros?)
d. cascade the filters.

Is there something I'm missing here (perhaps step b is impossible)? Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 18:09, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

step b is the design process. but you can show that the group delay of an analog (s-plane) all-pass filter is twice the natural log of the magnitude frequency response of just the poles (there's a scaling in there, but i cannot remember what it is). making an analog filter fit something exactly usually is impossible. also true for a digital filter. at least for the general case. r b-j 00:50, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay, just as I had thought. Thanks, then. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 07:08, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks! --mboverload@ 22:32, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Nyquist et al

Hi. Tried to give good reasons on the talk page. Can you be more specific about where I started to mess things up? --KYN 22:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

i presume you mean this rv . i'll take it to the talk page. r b-j 16:19, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

R, how about engaging in the discussion you've proposed. Calling me a dumptruck falls short of constructive feedback. Dicklyon 05:29, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Your action of reporting me is probably not an effective conversation starter, but I've added some review of my proposed edits, inviting your comments on specific edits instead of less-constructive type responses. Please? Dicklyon 06:33, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I see you've decided to invest your limited wiki time in trying to get me suspended, instead of engaging in the discussion that you claimed you wanted to have. In the mean time, we've been working on Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, and I think it's coming along fairly well. Still too long, but some progress being made. Dicklyon 23:21, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Hey, welcome back. But read the talk on the article you're working on. Your silence is deafening. Dicklyon 06:10, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks For The Plug

Hey, thanks for the plug on NPR. It gave me a good opportunity to send an e-mail not only clarifying the situation, but also establishing myself as an first hand expert of the unfortunate social structure of Misplaced Pages.

what are you talking about?

And to think, none of that would have happened if you didn't get in an edit war over some Catholic phrase back in December.

if you're referring the excuse User:Phroziac used to block me, it was because i reverted User:Rchamberlin's page blanking (of my notes to him) which i (correctly) interpreted as him writing me or the concerns i brought off. i noticed you and her are good friends now (she's still an admin and still very immature) and that User:Locke Cole and User:Mistress_whomever have left WP (because of their abuse). no one left on your side of that RfC against me you and Phro instigated. all of you have been discredited (as i said, you and Phro underestimated my legitimacy here). (it's funny, LC said that i had no right to have my usertalk page deleted and i cited the right-to-vanish principle which he used later to have his usertalk page deleted.) BTW, your citing of the fruitlessness of complaining ("whining") to Jimbo was also incorrect. eventually his threshold of seeing your username pop up was crossed. i had about a half dozen email exchanges with him and after that was resolved, i returned to WP. that explains the gap in my user contribs sometime around March. r b-j 21:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Really, i've also had about half a dozen e-mails with him as well, although not so pleasant, dealing with mostly with my rage towards the lack of structure that have hurt people in similiar situations as yours(excluding the rudeness) such as NSLE, SPUI, and many others, including Locke Cole, who I was good friends with and defended against a troll named Pigsonthewing.

Phro's in the cabal, so we're pretty much rivals on here now, unfortunately. Oh well, que sera. And it's funny you mention that meta page since it would seem to conflict with GFDL.

All is going well with me, I hope the same with you.

still "... the leader of the Democratic Party in Merrimack ..."? did i tell you that i introduced Howard Dean to a town hall meeting in Wentworth the week of the NH Primary (i think it was Jan 24th 2004)? i hope you learn how to wield power when you have it so you do some good and not piss off so many people that you lose it.
No kidding, Dean has certainly done that down in Washington lately(well, more doing nothing than doing anything bad). Absolute power corrupts absolutely, despite good intentions.
Dean has, unfortunately, become somewhat of a party hack. his "i hate republicans" or whatever similar statement he made was not helpful (as some other sorta shrill statements), but essentially nearly everything he has said in the campaign was completely true (Iraq, etc.). if the media would pay attention, Dean (shrill or not) would be nearly 100% vindicated. nearly everything he said about what W was doing (and the dems lack of conviction to stand up to it) was true and had been verified in the intervening time. r b-j 21:38, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

P.S- I have a few sockpuppets now, a few approaching becoming admins themselves. Hopefully I can use them to learn from my and your mistakes to create a Misplaced Pages with some habeas corpus; nobody should have the unlimited, unchecked power over such a widely accessed source of information that Jimbo and his admins have.

... which you were one of (and was unchecked and abusive long enough that you hurt the project). perhaps your other admin incarnations will be better behaved. r b-j 21:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
yes I was, and hopefully all users, regular and admin, can be empowered, hopefully avoiding the feeling of powerlessness that probably caused your poor behavior.
what "poor behavior"?? yours and Phro's RfC was discredited. it's your poor behavior. r b-j 21:32, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Stay out of trouble. ;-)

Your friendly neighborhood toxic personality, still around...

Karmafist 21:23, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Re: Baseband

Hi Rbj. Yeah, Baseband was a bit of a nightmare before I did something about it. You're of course welcome to upload a more colourful image (although generally, I find that if the colour is key to explaining something then the explanation isn't good enough). But baseband signals begin at 0 Hz under any common definition, so no, there are no negative frequencies. The baseband bandwidth is half the RF bandwidth (and vice versa) as the article says, and that would make no sense (i.e. be impossible) if the negative-going spectral components were also present at baseband. CERN's definition here concurs, as does a knowledgeable sounding article here. Now I know more about Wikpedia then when I wrote Baseband, I see that those links ought probably to be added to the article. I'll find the time later today. Thanks, Splash - tk 13:57, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

PNG images in TeX

Hi Rbj. Note that per the math style manual it is good if possible to avoid inline formulas become PNG images. So a formula better be typed <math>f </math> than <math>f \ </math>. I fixed that at Euler's formula. You can reply here if you have comments. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:44, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

yeah, that really is a question whether it looks better rendered PNG than not. there are other articles where i bumped up the inline m a t h   {\displaystyle math\ } to force PNG rendering. there is not universal agreement which looks better. r b-j 02:54, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, the rule of thumb is that PNG images have a larger size than inline html, and that's why inline html is preferd. On my current machine that is indeed the case, and the m a t h   {\displaystyle math\ } thing not only is huge but also pushed down half a line, you can imagine how ugly that looks.
But I am aware that on other machines PNG looks fine (if the PNG resolution makes pictures appear same size as text). Anyways, I just told you the math style guideline. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:06, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Dimensionless quantities

You said:

"just as when one counts tick marks (a dimensionless number) on a ruler when they measure length, when we use any measuring instrument to read a physical quantity it was designed for results in a fundamentally dimensionless number. it's in the interpretation of that reading and knowledge of what it uses as a standard to measure the physical quantity, that we attach units to the reading."

That's all fine and good, but you can use the same logic to show that everything in the universe is unitless. Ed Sanville 07:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with the statement that everything is unitless when you use Planck units, or atomic units, etc. You are simply using a different set of units in each case. The fact that there are different "sets" of unitless systems is testament to the fact that they do in fact have units, and that you need to use those units to convert between the different "unitless" systems. Being a computational chemist, I use the atomic units quite a bit, by the way... but claiming that they're "unitless" just ain't right! Certain quantities really are unitless, though, and there is a big difference between Planck units and those situations. Quantities that are truly unitless are always the same quantity, no matter what unit system is being used, which does not apply to anything measurable in Planck units or atomic units. An example of a truly unitless quantity would be the proton/electron mass ratio. I hope this didn't come off as rude or arrogant, I only wanted to italicize important stressed words.

PS. I copied it here so you'd get that "You have messages" thing. Ed Sanville 15:16, 5 September 2006 (UTC)


Rbj, I agree with Ed and I think you changed back for worse the article of Physical constant. Please read Talk:Physical_constant#Removed_paragraph for a more detailed explanation. Please think about it and let me know your conclusions. --Kehrli 10:00, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I should make you aware of comments by arbitrators on Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Kehrli/Proposed_decision. The good news is that I have done 90+% of the work for you to get this subject delt with quickly. The bad news is that you need to make the arbitration comittee aware of your grievences directly. I would advise you to waste as little time as possible on this issue and by that I mean give your input forcefully and vocally and then disengage from any conflict and move on. Babysit the outcome (watch all arbitration pages and affected pages) but don't waste time with arguing, reverting etc. The pages can always be reverted later. Just trying to save you from my headache. --Nick Y. 01:34, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

physical quantities

Hi Rbj, maybe we should take this discussion off-line. Look, I really don't want to be rude or trolling or anything. However, there seems to be some misunderstanding going on and maybe it is just different terminology. In my (and ISO 31) terminology, a quantity Q is defined as Q = n*U where n is a numerical factor and U is a reference (unit). The "value of Q" in my terminology is n*U. Example: if Q is the "height of the Eiffel tower" then the value of Q (this height) is 300 m. It seems to me that for you the "value of Q" is just n. So the height of the Eiffel tower is 300. In ISO 31 terminology, h = 300m = 900ft. In your terminology h = 300 < 900. While I do know that in theoretical physics it is very common to declare (or assume) that natural units are used and then to go on and ignore all units, in the rest of the world this is very uncommon and also not in line with the IUPAP red book, the ISO 31 and therefore should be considered jargon. Droping the units may be handy in theoretical physics but it has certain dangers which are illustrated in our discussion. Well defined terms become fuzzy and misunderstandings occurr. Some examples:

1) when dropping units, a dimensionful quantity Q=n*U suddenly looks like Q=n (a unitless quantity). Thereby this Q now seems to depend on the system of units which of course is not the case if the units are not dropped (Q = n*U). See example above.
2) when "normalizing" (NIST-)fundamental constants these constants become Q=1*U. When dropping units, they look like Q=1 and therefore people get the impression they "eliminated" the constants, which is not true since the constants still have their imensions and units and therefore cannot be eliminated. Dimensional analysis is no longer possible if those constants are "eliminated". In my opinion the term "elimination of constants" is physics jargon and should not be on Misplaced Pages. It will completely confuse people that are trying to get advice on Misplaced Pages.

For those reasons I suggest that for the moment we do not drop units, we keep to the terminology of the IUPAP and the ISO 31 (which you find in the IUPAC green book). This way we will talk the same language. Note: this does not keep us from using natural units. It just means that we keep their units. --Kehrli 09:45, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Rbj, I just had a quick discussion with Ed and he made me realyze that indeed many physicists may consider n as the "value" of Q=n*U in which case the "value of Q" will depend on the units used. However, the conventional terminology is that n*U is the value of Q. For example the IUPAC green book states in Chapter 1.1:

The value of a physical quantity can be expressed as the product of a numerical value and a unit: physical quantity = numerical value x unit.

So I hope you agree that this makes it clear that the product n*U is the value of Q and not n, and that all our dispute was only a matter of different terminology. --Kehrli 12:49, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

this is a content dispute. unlike the MS, which appears to me to be a dispute of convention, this is a substantive content dispute, neither of us are wanting to dicreetly ask the other for clarification. both are confident of the correctness of each respective position. the discussion of the content of an article should be on that article's talk page and every editor with an interest or investment gets to participate, input other perspectives, and decide what is their own position. if it comes down to it editors vote if no rough consensus is reached. so i'm taking it from there. but i'm not rehashing every point. i have a life outside WP and the internet and i don't have the time.r b-j 21:53, 16 September 2006 (UTC)