User talk:JRSpriggs/Archive 1

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This is the file "User talk:JRSpriggs/Archive 1" which archives User talk:JRSpriggs.

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 Zero Sharp 2 Brent's method 3 Finding multiple roots 3.1 how to merge 4 Math formatting 5 Answer two months latter 6 Inaccessible cardinal 7 cc 8 Translational motion doesn't contribute to heat energy 9 Merge of ultrafilter lemma 10 Beth numbers 11 Ineffable cardinal 12 Photon in the box 13 Thanks 14 <insert name here> operator 15 Note on talk page about 4 forces 16 Virtual particle 17 AIV 18 re: Werdnabot Timing 19 Comment on the "M operator" redirect page 20 Metric Signature 21 Reply to message 22 Should I Make A Redirect? 23 Derivative 24 Werdnabot 25 φ(y, x2, ..., xn) versus φ(y, x1, ..., xn) 26 Observable universe 27 Debatepedia.com - on minimum wage

Zero Sharp

OK, mixing in here. There's an extra technical condition you have to add to indiscernibility, called "remarkability" if I remember right, that guarantees that the indiscernibles are "Silver indiscernibles". With that extra condition they're unique. If indiscernibles exist then so do Silver indiscernibles, and I believe you find them just by taking the smallest ordinal that's one of a proper class of indiscernibles, and then the smallest that's one of a proper class of indiscernibles containing the first one you fixed, and so on. Or something like that. See Jech for the formal statement of the condition—something to do with every ordinal being expressible as a term in terms of indiscernibles, such that the value of the term doesn't change if you change indiscernibles above the ordinal the term denotes. --Trovatore 06:55, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Brent's method

Thanks very much for correcting my error in the algorithm in Brent's method, especially since it was the kind of mistake that could have sat there for years without anybody noticing it. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 02:42, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

You are welcome. JRSpriggs 04:28, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Finding multiple roots

Hello. I saw you started the article Finding multiple roots, thanks. It is always nice to see somebody getting infected with the Wikipedia bug :) I do have some questions about the article though:

1. Why did you decide to start a new article, instead of adding an extra section to Root-finding algorithm? I prefer to have a few long articles with a couple of people working on them and correcting each other, rather than spreading out our works on many small articles (but this is partially a matter of taste).
2. Ideally, every article should be supported by a couple of references. Please add one or two.
3. I'm especially interested in references, because it is not clear to me how to compute the gcd in the presence of rounding error. If the example you give in Finding multiple roots is computed with floating-point arithmetic, then the remainder might not be zero.
4. There is a host of style issues, as explained in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics), but those are of minor importance.

Since you (rightly) criticized my work on Brent's method, I hope you don't mind if I return the favour. ;)

Thanks again for your work, and I hope you are enjoying it.

All the best, Jitse Niesen (talk) 06:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your interest in my article. I appreciate your feed-back. I responded on the discussion page for that article. JRSpriggs 12:27, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

how to merge

All work on wikipedia is licensed under the GFDL license, which ensures that the work is always free to be edited and copied. This license is a cornerstone of the way that wikipedia works. One of the stipulations of the license is that all authors be credited. This is accomplished on wikipedia via the "history" function. Copy-paste edits are tricky, because they kill all authorship information. Nevertheless, copy-paste edits are sometimes necessary. The accepted method for dealing with this is this: when you do a copy-paste merge, you must mention in the edit summary where the text comes from. Doing so ensures that anyone who needs to can follow the trail of edits and see the author of the original text. The ability to track edits in this way is a legal requirement of the GFDL, so merges which are not done in accord with this principle must be reverted. I note that in this edit (where you carry out the merger), you merge and mention the source article. Thus your actions are within the terms of the license, and your merger is done correctly. I will suggest that, although not required, it is convenient if you wikify your edit summary (thus instead of an edit summary of merge in text of "Finding multiple roots", you could have used an edit summary with a text of merge in text of [[Finding multiple roots]]). This is a matter of convenience, not a legal requirement. It seems to me that your merger meets the legal requirements, and so is perfectly acceptable. For more information, visit Wikipedia:Merging and moving pages. -lethe ^{talk +} 07:24, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, if you look at Talk:Root-finding_algorithm and go down to the section on "Merger with the 'Finding multiple roots' article", you will see that I explain how to get to the history of the old article. JRSpriggs 07:38, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

In the past, when I have performed mergers, I also merged the talk pages. It seems to me to be quite disorganized to have a single article with many different relevant talk pages. Thus I think it could be preferable to also merge Talk:Finding multiple roots into Talk:Root-finding algorithm. Nevertheless, there is no policy which dictates that this must be done. It is simply my own personal preference. Feel free to ignore it. -lethe ^{talk +} 07:54, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Lethe, I took your advice and merged the contents of the talk; converting "Talk:Finding multiple roots" into a redirect to "Talk:Root-finding algorithm". I also added direct pointers to the histories of "Finding multiple roots" and "Talk:Finding multiple roots" at Talk:Root-finding algorithm. However, when I tried your suggestion of putting a pointer into the edit summary there, it did not work because the pointer was redirected back. JRSpriggs 09:11, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I did not react on all your merging activities because you are doing very well. Yes, the link to Talk:Finding multiple roots in the edit summary redirects back, but if you want to go to that talk page, you can follow the "redirected from …" link on top of the page which you get when clicking on the link to Talk:Finding multiple roots. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 09:58, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I did not know that I could get back to the redirect that way. That will be helpful. JRSpriggs 10:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Math formatting

Hi JRSpriggs. Thank you for the additions at Newton's method. I did some formatting there, using math tags, <math></math>. They are available on the toolbar at the top of the edit box. One should use either that, or html tags. So for example, variables should always be italic, either ''x'' or <math>x</math>, but never an x by itself (compare x vs x vs plain x). Just a tip. You can reply here if you have comments. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:12, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Answer two months latter

from your comment in cardinality, its my initials... cjrs... Cjrs 79 21:06, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Inaccessible cardinal

Re the countability/uncountability of inaccessible cardinals: I am not an expert on set theory, but at least the online sources I could find with google (e.g. Springer Encyclopedia of Mathematics, PlanetMath, several others) define inaccessibility without the requirement for uncountability. Could you provide a reference to convince me that the definition of inaccessibility with uncountability is "more standard"? — Tobias Bergemann 10:24, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

For me, the main point is that I would have to keep making exceptions every time I talk about inaccessibles, if I defined it to include aleph-null. JRSpriggs 10:29, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

True, but an encyclopedia should report about inaccessibles as they are most commonly defined in the relevant literature. However, your references below are good enough for me. Sorry for belaboring such a minor point. — Tobias Bergemann 11:13, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

"Mathematical Logic" by Joseph R. Schoenfield defines inaccessible (on page 304) in a way which requires them to be uncountable. On pages 208 & 209 of "Simplified Independence Proofs" by J. Barkley Rosser, he says "Some people hold a firm conviction that some inaccessible cardinals exist ..." which implies that inaccessibles are uncountable since the existence of aleph-null is not controversial. Suppes defines them to include aleph-null, but he also includes 2 as an inaccessible, which is ridiculous. JRSpriggs 10:55, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. — Tobias Bergemann 11:13, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

cc

From Talk:order (group theory) Ahhhhh. I see. I have forgotten how to distinguish capital and small letters.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  :) Thank you. --VKokielov 03:30, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I have another question, if you have the opportunity. I understand that there are groups of infinite order in which every element generates a finite subgroup. Would you offer an example? But only if you know it at once; I don't want you to construct it for me. The algebra book says Z_p[x] is one like that, but I don't know how to read that symbol. --VKokielov 03:30, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

That notation means the set of polynomials with coefficients in Z_p. So for example 2x³ + x², and remember that the coefficients are regarded as numbers mod 3. This polynomial has order 3 in the additive group, as does every other element in the group. -lethe ^{talk +} 04:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I assume that you are taking p = 3. JRSpriggs 04:46, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much. --VKokielov 05:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Translational motion doesn't contribute to heat energy

• JR: Please see Thermodynamic temperature: Discussion Thermodynamic temperature discussion page. Greg L 18:20, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

• I understand now what you intended. I've responded in the discussion page. Greg L 20:26, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Merge of ultrafilter lemma

Thanks for fixing the double redirects there. It completely slipped my mind that there might be pages that redirected to it. CMummert 12:15, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Beth numbers

You wrote:

Notice that for any cardinals κ and μ, there is an ordinal α such that

That's true in ZF, and in ZFU+AC, but not necessarily in ZFU, and it's not obvious. Perhaps rephrasing and/or citation is in order. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 15:10, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Done. JRSpriggs 04:15, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Ineffable cardinal

Ineffable cardinal is considered to be a topic of number theory. --GoOdCoNtEnT 02:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

If you want to add it to the number theory category, go ahead. But I think that having more than one targeted stub is excessive. JRSpriggs 02:54, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Photon in the box

Please do not pass judgement on things that you clearly do not understand. Try reading the modern treatment of "mass" in relativity. Until you understand, please abstain in making decisions. See here, fresh from Harvard:

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys16/Textbook/ch11.pdf

Have a look at chapter 11.8.....

After you read, you will understand that you reverted to an incorrect and outdated view of things. If you are a scientist, you will hopefully understand.....Ati3414 05:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

You, sir, are a fool who thinks he knows what he does not know. I am quite familiar with both special and general relativity and have solved the equations of general relativity in some cases. I know what I am talking about and you do not. JRSpriggs 05:42, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The fact that you are getting abusive demonstrates that have run out of logical arguments. Try reading the recommended chapter, it is standard fare in universities nowadays, it may have been some time since you studied the subject and things have changed.Ati3414 05:49, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

JR, please keep your cool. Ati3414 will quickly exhaust community patience and be banned; there is no need to risk sanctions yourself. Ati3414, for your part, I'd just as soon you didn't keep your cool; you can work out why for yourself. --Trovatore 05:44, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Dear Il Trovatore, I suggest that you take your frustrations with the new view, try reading the chapter from the current curriculum at Harvard: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys16/Textbook/ch11.pdf , have a look at 11.8

or Cornell: http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/~cew2/P209/part11.pdf or MIT, or Stanford.... Ati3414 05:49, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Trovatore: Thanks. I will try not to do anything rash. I just felt that someone had to confront him with the facts of the situation.
Ati3414: You may not understand why you are wrong, but I suggest that you desist from promoting views that clearly conflict with the overwhelming consensus of editors here. JRSpriggs 06:17, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks, but he just moved it from my userpage, some IP user posted it and he thought it was funny =D --mboverload@ 08:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

As I saw a moment later when I looked at your user page. Why have you not replied to my messages on your user page about you "correcting" words to the wrong spelling? JRSpriggs 08:41, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

<insert name here> operator

Are you aware that you did not move μ operator (originally mu operator) back to its former name, but rather to the nonsense μu operator? -- EJ 05:41, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

No. I thought I put it back correctly except for a problem with redirects. I do not think that a name with an actual mu in it is even possible. What proof do you have? JRSpriggs 05:47, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Just click on mu operator, you'll see "Μu operator (Redirected from Mu operator)". All Unicode character are valid in article names (well, almost). -- EJ 05:51, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

That is the redirect problem. There is a redirect with the same name as the article which is taking precidence over the article and then redirecting you to the article. I cannot fix that. I asked User talk:Oleg Alexandrov to fix it. We will just have to wait for him or another administrator to do it. Blame CyberSkull for vandalizing the article in the first place. JRSpriggs 06:01, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

No, wait. I know what happened. When I move the article back I just added a "u" to the title after what looked like an "M", but it must have been a capital mu "Μ" instead. JRSpriggs 06:08, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Yes, that's what I am saying. In fact, you couldn't move the article back, because it is impossible to overwrite an existing article by a move (it has to be deleted first, which requires an admin), and the redirect created by the first move counts as an existing article. -- EJ 06:26, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I tried again but it did not work. Now I really do not know. Is there a way to see whether a character is a capital M or a capital mu Μ? JRSpriggs 06:22, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Use a font where they are distinguishable, or look at the URL (where non-ASCII characters are encoded by % escapes). If "tried again" means you tried another move, it cannot work for the reasons above (the redirect has to be deleted first). -- EJ 06:29, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Oleg just fixed it. But according to Wikipedia:Merging and moving pages, "If the destination does exist, but it only contains a redirect without any history, the move will still work — the designers of the MediaWiki software recognised this as a special case in which no information will be lost if a move is performed.". Therefor, I thought that the redirect at Mu operator would just be overwritten. JRSpriggs 06:44, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I see, I was mistaken on that point. Presumably the history was non-empty after all the changes, as per "This is especially likely to happen if there is a history of moves from one name to another." Anyway, all is good now. -- EJ 16:57, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Note on talk page about 4 forces

I have some concerned about some of the remarks you made about 4-forces in the article on "special relativity". Rather than interrupt an active edit session, I've put my concerns on the talk page.Pervect 07:52, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Virtual particle

If virtual particles were unobservable by their very nature, they wouldn't be physics. They are very much part of physics, if they didn't exist then QED wouldn't work properly; and the observables there would be different.

So they have been detected, photons and electrostatics are both detectable, it's complete nonsense.WolfKeeper 07:13, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

You are missing the point. They cannot be observed INDIVIDUALLY (as single quanta). They have COLLECTIVE effects which are observed. JRSpriggs 07:17, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

AIV

Hello. Thanks for keeping a check on vandals. Please note that WP:AIV is only for ongoing cases of vandalism. Before listing a vandal here make sure that "The vandal vandalized within the last few hours and after the final warning". Some of the vandals you have listed recently have not edited since some time and some not since their last warning. Take note of this next time. And keep up the good work. - Aksi_great (talk) 10:20, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

re: Werdnabot Timing

Thanks for that! Randfan 15:17, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment on the "M operator" redirect page

If there is such a problem, why do you not request full protection of the page, so that only administrators can modify the redirect. Whenever you leave a comment on a page that contains a redirect, it always ends up showing that there is a broken redirect. When that happens, user like me will go around and fix the problem. I suggest tha you do something else to let people know about the problem. --Willy No1lakersfan (Talk - Contribs) 15:26, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I was not aware of the problem you mentioned; and I apologize. It appears that the "nowiki" you added fixes that. Thank you. JRSpriggs 04:27, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

You are very welcome. I am sorry if I did anything that you felt was wrong to the redirect. --Willy No1lakersfan (Talk - Contribs) 20:37, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Metric Signature

Hi JR. I liked some of 207.200.116.139 edits. The one that really got under my skin, though, was the signature convention. I started a little discussion on Talk:Special relativity. I'd really like to see a consensus formed if there isn't one already. I thought you might like to comment. --MOBle 16:25, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Reply to message

I have replied to your comment on my talk page. Rawling 12:22, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Should I Make A Redirect?

I use Werdnabot, and checked my talkarchive template and noticd that the "current talk page" link is User:WarthogDemon/Archive . . . which doesn't exist. Can I redirect that page to User talk:WarthogDemon or would that mess Werdnabot's archiving job up? -WarthogDemon 21:46, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

To WarthogDemon: Apparently, the "talkarchive" template assumes that the current talk page is the immediate parent of the page on which the template is located. So if you want that pointer to go directly and correctly to your current talk page, then you should have made your archive be "User talk:WarthogDemon/Archive 2" instead of "User talk:WarthogDemon/Archive/Archive 2". Most users have their archive pages directly under their talk pages. Oddly, Werdna himself does it the way you do.

You could try making "User talk:WarthogDemon/Archive" into a redirect to "User talk:WarthogDemon". But I cannot tell you what would happen, since I have never worked with a redirect which has subpages. On the other hand, you do not really need to use the pointer created by the template, because there is already a pointer provided on each subpage which in your case appears in small print directly below "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and has the form "< User talk:WarthogDemon".

On another subject, the reason why your section "Bartells" did not archive is that Werdnabot needs at least one (and perhaps two in some cases) time stamp(s) in a section in order to know when to archive it. You can fix this by making it a practice to add a time stamp to any section which lacks one by using "~~~~~" (five tildas). JRSpriggs 10:03, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. ^_^ (And sorry for the late thanks.) If you're interested, I decided to make the redirect page. What happens is that the User talk and the Archive links appear side by side each other in the top left. In case you wanted to add that on Werdnabot's page or something. Thanks again. :) -WarthogDemon 04:47, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

You are welcome. Thanks for the feed-back. JRSpriggs 08:00, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Derivative

Yes, but, as Dr. Johnson said, people need reminding more than informing. I thought regular-sized fonts might help, but maybe next I'd be wanting regular-sized everything. In the meanwhile, I might just use what you have for my new Qualitative economics article & learn more on tex. Thx. BW, Thomasmeeks 13:08, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Werdnabot

Actually I'm manually archiving because Werdnabot is not working on my talk page. There was stuff there over a month old. Guy (Help!) 09:11, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, as you can see from your revision history, it is working now. The only reason it had not worked, since I changed the "Talk" to "talk", was that you were pre-empting it by archiving manually before the section's most recent entry was old enough to cause Werdnabot to archive it. JRSpriggs 06:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. Let me emphasize that Werdnabot decides whether to archive a section based on its MOST RECENT message, not on its oldest message. So you might very well have sections over a month old as judged by their oldest (i.e. earliest) message. JRSpriggs 07:03, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

φ(y, x₂, ..., x_n) versus φ(y, x₁, ..., x_n)

Actually I changed these to reflect the form that Kleene (1952) p. 219 uses (i.e. the first form φ(y, x₂, ..., x_n)). We see the usage repeated elsewhere (e.g. p. 237) so it is not a typo. Kleene is a very precise author -- the book was on its 10th printing in 1991 and errata had been fixed over the years. But I don't suppose too many readers will catch the sublety here (that y is taking the place of x₁, that these x and y are really place-holders for parameters and require natural numbers to fill them and they are not to be manipulated by algebra). Whether or not its worth changing them back to Kleene's form is another question. wvbaileyWvbailey 15:30, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

In Mu-recursive function, the preceeding line said and still says "* (5) Primitive recursion operator: Takes functions and and returns the unique function f such that". I changed the "x_2" to "x_1" to be consistent with that notation. Notice that the "y" and "z" arguments of "h" are not replaced by "x"s. See the criticism by User talk:CBKAtTopsails at Talk:Computable function. JRSpriggs 07:50, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Observable universe

You added a reference for the term billion as used in that article. Isn't billion commonly denominating "one thousand million" rather than "one million million" in English-speaking countries? Kncyu38 14:38, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

There are British people who insist on using "billion" to mean million million. And someone previously changed the "billion"s in the article to "thousand million"s for that reason. So I thought that to prevent confusion and a possible edit war, it would be best to specify what we mean in a foot-note. JRSpriggs 07:42, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I see what you mean. It's really not a question of wrong or right, but of different approaches to the same problem. I happen to think it might be better to standardise the usage of such an important numeral throughout Wikipedia than to arbitrarily decide upon usage per article, so as not to confuse readers with different usage in different articles. But since I have no idea where or how to propose something like this, you may as well revert my latest change. Better to have clarity over the usage in this article, than no clarity at all. Kncyu38 13:06, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I put both our methods together. JRSpriggs 04:21, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I had the same in mind. Kncyu38 08:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Debatepedia.com - on minimum wage

Noticed your good contributions on the "minimum wage article" and am curious if you'd be interested in the minimum wage debate article on Debatepedia.com, and helping develop it. Minimum Wage Debate Loudsirens 21:25, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

My position is that the minimum wage is purely destructive and should be repealed. Anyone familiar with Economics knows this. Those who support the minimum wage are being deceptive. Their actual motives are malevolent, not benevolent as they pretend. JRSpriggs 10:18, 7 December 2006 (UTC)