User talk:Lethe/archive1

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Archive
Archives
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  1. March 8, 2004 – Jan 8 2006
  2. Jan 11 2006 – Apr 17 2006
  3. April 18, 2006 – June 15, 2006
  4. June 16, 2006 – Sept 3, 2006
  5. current

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some tips:

Other useful pages are: how to edit, how to write a great article, naming conventions, manual of style and the Wikipedia policies.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Angela. 03:52, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

Gauge integral?

Is Gauge integral the same thing as Henstock-Kurzweil integral? -- Walt Pohl 20:55, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hmm.. so it is. i will make a redirect.

Angela's newbie answers

Is there a way to count all your contributions, and see how many there are?

You can go to the contributions page, and then add limit=1000 to the URL (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Lethe&limit=1000) to see more than 50 of them at once. Then paste this into a text editor and number them. There isn't any automatic way to do this within Wikipedia, though I believe some people have written scripts which help. If the manual way is not enough, try asking Pcb21 as I seem to remember he had such a script. You have 327 by the way.

Is it possible to view pages from other parts of wikipedia all on my en.wikipedia watchlist? It would be really convenient to be able to watch certain de.wikipedia pages alongside my en.wikipedia watchlist

Not yet unfortunately. There are definitely plans to have a single sign-on across languages which might make this possible, but currently you need to maintain a separate account and watchlist on each wiki.

If someone has uploaded a picture to de.wikipedia, is it possible to make include the picture in a en.wikipedia article? or do i have to download the picture from de.w to my computer, and then upload from my computer to en.w, and then include it in the en.wikipedia page?

Again, it's not possible yet. The proposal at m:Wikimedia Commons does address this point, and if enough people are interested in coding this, it should become possible over the next year. Currently, you do need to download a copy locally and re-upload that to the other Wikipedia.

What's the process for getting a page deleted?

It depends what the page is. Wikipedia:Deletion policy has the full details, but a quick summary is

Hope that helps. Angela. 13:32, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Speedy request

It is done. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 11:49, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

5000 people test

Re: comment on my talk
The "5000 people test" (alternatively, the "1000 people test") is a rule of thumb for deciding whether or not information belongs on the wiki. If you think there aren't 5000 people who would care to know, don't write it. I think that this is a manifestly good idea, but I haven't seen it on any "official" Wikipolicy pages, and I don't know where I got it from. How did you come across it, and why was it associated with my name? --Smack 22:05, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Differential geometry and topology

I do not think the definition of vector field should be in Differential geometry and topology, there is a ref. to vector field (which is not written well but it is better to improve this insead of giving def in Differential geometry and topology). (Those who read Differential geometry and topology probably will need just idea of vector field (and it is given) and they might go to vector field to get the correct def.) I do not insist on my change, that is not at all crutial, but still think that my edit is bit better. (I'm teaching a bit and I know that many students can work with vector field easely, but words secton of tangent bundle scare them) Tosha 12:14, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I also will not insist on the changes, but i do think you should in general try a bit harder to repurpose words before deleting them. Or at least move them to the talk page and give an explanation of why they are inappropriate. I added stuff about vector fields to that article because someone in the Lie algebra talk page seemed to need an explanation of some notions of vectors and Lie brackets. I guess I didn't put it in vector fields because that article seemed hopelessly elementary, but perhaps you are right, it would have looked better there. It needs to go somewhere, and I think it is counterproductive to delete the words. The explanation that needs to be somewhere would now have to be started over. So what I ask is that you say something in the talk page before you start deleting sentences in the interests of brevity and pedagogy. If you do delete a sentence that happens to be one that I wrote the day before, and give no explanation, then i will revert your edit. I hope that doesn't seem like I am being unreasonable? - Lethe 15:32, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)

Revaz Dogonadze and Quantum Electrochemistry

It appears to be a real area of research (which is why I have not sent Dogonadze article to vfd) but a very obscure one. All the other of 5-8 discoveries mentioned in the "history" section of Quantum mechanics are of Nobel-prize caliber (I would even say they stand out even among Nobel-prize winners). Quantum electrochemistry is very far from that level. And we are dealing with one of authors here and he has been inserting similar texts into other physics pages as well (and possibly created a page on himself as well, although he claims that that page was created by someone else). The whole episode looks like a promotion attempt. Andris 08:19, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Talk page link

From any page in Wikipedia, click on Preferences in the top right hand corner and under the User data heading is a box where you can alter your nickname (it says Your nickname (for signatures):). In there you need to do a bit of jiggery pokery, that looks a bit like this:

Lethe]] | [[User talk:Lethe|Talk

You can alter it to whatever your preferences are and can even add extra characters, use colour or bold or italics to your heart's content, as several people who use wikipedia often do. Have fun, and let me know how you get on. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 16:04, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)


test1 -- Slim 16:56, Aug 5, 2004 (UTC)
test2 -- Lethe | Talk 16:59, Aug 5, 2004 (UTC)

Graham ☺ | Talk Lethe | Talk to my page! | to my talk!

Robert S. Shankland

Hi, I noticed your edits to this article, and I agree that Reddi's version was unbalanced (not atypical for him, unfortunately). I did a literature search for all of the papers that cite Shankland's 1955 analysis, and I couldn't find any mainstream publications that question it. I've rewritten the article accordingly, including some quotes from Shankland and Einstein on the subject; see what you think. (Be sure to look at the history in case Reddi follows his usual pattern and reverts.) —Steven G. Johnson 21:08, Aug 24, 2004 (UTC)

My version is balanced. Much like Alfven's problem with his research, mainstream publications do not include works that truely question Shankland (but that doesn't change facts). My usual pattern of revert? No ... just reinclusion of opposing views. JDR

Edit attribution

Hi Lethe. Edits from 128.104.220.225 have now been reattributed to you. Regards — Kate Turner | Talk 04:57, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)

Same for 66.188.128.19. Regards — Kate Turner | Talk 10:36, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)

Edits to Scotland

The edits to the Scotland article weren't vandalism. If you had read the "Nation or Country" section in its talk page you would have understood what was going on. I'm not going to revert your changes but if similar changes happen, just leave them. Either version is acceptable to me, although to be frank I prefer the country one. -- Derek Ross | Talk 04:00, 2004 Sep 20 (UTC)


Hindi spelling

Hi,

Regarding translation of French in Hindi, it's not फ़्रांसीसी or फ़्राँसीसी, it should be फ़्राँसीसी or फ़्रांसीसी.

Punjabi is पंजाबी.

In my dictionaries (English-Hindi, by J.W. Raker & R. Shukla, Star Publications, New Delhi, Outline of Hindi Grammar, R.S. McGregor, Oxford U.P., and Teach Yourself Hindi, by R. Snell and S. Weightmann, Hodder & Stoughton), English is अँग्रेज़ी 3 times and अंग्रेज़ी once.

Writing Hindi when WP doesn't support Unicode is not fun. :( Yann 08:47, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Image:Ornefnaskra Isl 1081618531960.gif

Thanks for uploading Image:Ornefnaskra Isl 1081618531960.gif. I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GFDL, or {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) Thanks so much, – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 20:27, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

Hiroshima

"*Some have argued ... In the event, the decision to surrender was made before ..."
"i can't understand this phrasing. maybe it's a typo?"
No, just a way of saying that whatever other ways things might have worked out, the way they did happen was ----. I thought it was a common, clear phrasing, but if not I'm not wedded to it. "In any event" doesn't seem quite right somehow; maybe "As it happened"?
—wwoods 02
15, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

CHT self-promotion?

I do see what you mean but it can't be helped. See more on my own user page. My work is the best available reference. Caroline Thompson 10:37, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It can be helped; stop doing it. -Lethe | Talk

Dear Lethe

Have you tried the alternative to my paper? The only other useful reference on the detection loophole is Philip Pearle's 1970 paper (Pearle, P: “Hidden-Variable Example Based upon Data Rejection”, Physical Review D, 2, 1418-25 (1970)). This paper says essentially the same thing as mine but is accessible only to mathematicians! It has no diagrams, and the only reason I was able to understand it was that I had already worked out a similar geometrical model for myself. Caroline Thompson 17:49, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That does not change the fact that you are using wikipedia to promote your own work, and you need to stop doing it. -Lethe | Talk

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

I've added another FAQ question which will hopefully answer some of your questions. I can't speak to why the FSF doesn't like the CC licenses, but I would imagine it has to do with the non-free portions of the GFDL that are not in "true-free" licenses like the CC-by-sa license. See the FAQ question. Many people, including Jimbo Wales, acknowledge the problems with the non-free portions of the GFDL and he has been working with the FSF to change the GFDL to make it more CC-by-sa'ish. – Ram-Man (comment) (talk)[[]] 21:32, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

Bell's theorem

Please have a look at some of the recent exchanges in the tal kpage there. Unfortunately most of my time working on that article has been dealing with CT. Thanks.CSTAR 01:53, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC).

I wrote a pretty strong reply to CT -- maybe I went a little overboard, but please comment. Thanks! CSTAR 20:52, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Re: Realism, loopholes etc.

I have absolutely no objection to putting in references to loopholes (in fact, if you look at what I wrote, I have done so). But the problem is that CT seems intent on suppressing any statement which goes against her positions or subtly rephrasing them so as to make QM look suspect. Have you ever read her webpage? I did so the other day. It makes fascinating reading. She is a firm believer in naive (not to say cranky) physics.

If she really wanted to, and had the will to stop trying to convince scientists they are wrong, she could convert her interest into a serious research programme as follows: First provide a naive model for some subset of physics and investigate the processes by which "mainstream" scientists, often based on partial evidence or even flawe reasoning, might reject these models. This is a much rational form of the so-called "strong programme"

As far as my response to her today, I just got fed up with her ever more irrelevant objections to my contributions. In particular, her comment about the case of the probabilistic case of Bell's theorem for random variables having 0 as a possible value, not being also trivial really showed me she really doesn't know what she is talking about or at best talks impulsively without thinking. Of course, she later denied having ever said that it was not trivial, but I believe her denial was just her attempt to save face.CSTAR 04:56, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey, thanks for the help with Adjoint endomorphism. linas 14:23, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The Big Leagues

I guess CT finally made it [1].CSTAR 02:45, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Enough Votes

I think there are enough votes for the deletion of the List of English words of Latin origin. How long will it take before they delete it. Decius 07:37, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

comment to Tony

Sorry Lethe, don't know what happen there. Must have been some kind of edit conflict, I can't see how I would have deleted it otherwise? —Christiaan 23:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

By the way

How do you work out how many edits you've done? —Christiaan 23:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My method is rather brute force. I go to my contributions, list by 1000, offset to the nearest thousand, view the page source, and change the unordered list to an ordered list (change <ul> and </ul> to <ol> and </ol>) Lethe | Talk 00:35, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)
There's a little page that'll count for you here. I think it's a rather dangerous idea, personally, but that doesn't stop me from checking it. --Laura Scudder | Talk 18:41, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Talk:Lists of English words of international origin

Help! Xe's putting the dictionaries back in. Uncle G 19:00, 2005 Mar 3 (UTC)

Xfig

Of course there are lots of LaTeX picture environments and they're getting better. Though it's far from perfect, I really like xfig.

I don't have access to the book you mentioned at the moment.

Make sure you you've got a recent version of Xfig:

% xfig -v Xfig 3.2 patchlevel 3d (Protocol 3.2)

I'm kind of limited by the accuracy of my hand/eye coordination moving the mouse. Are there precise commands for things like: parallel/perpendicular lines or graphing functions or plotting points with coordinates?

Use grid mode; you will be prompted if you want vertical or horizontal displacement.

you can also zoom in.

You can put any latex math symbols in the text areas (for instance $\frac{a}{b}$) using the "special flag" and exporting to "combined/PS LaTex both parts". This produces two text files one of which you include in your LaTeX source.

Of course it expands correctly any macros defined in the source. CSTAR 00:43, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Did this work? CSTAR 15:41, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to Argentina for a few weeks, so I won't have time to look at much. However, xfig should export 2 files

fuba.pstex
fuba.pstex_t

The file you input is fuba.pstex_t

\input{tree.pstex_t}

You might have to edit pstex_t

CSTAR 21:07, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Pronoun on willys!

I tagged that article for speedy deletion. It was deleted by Ahoerstemeier. Goplat 20:19, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Exactly, I deleted it, as it was a leftover from one of the User:Willy on wheels page move vandalism. Probably you have Pronoun on your watchlist, that's why that other page was added when the article was temporarily at the vandalized place. You can savely remove that article from your watchlist now. andy 20:20, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Metric system in the United States

I just restored the line you removed. If you don't understand please ask on the talk page instead of removing what turns out to be valid information and asking in the edit summary. In the case of lumber a 2 by 4 is not 2 inches by 4 inches, it is about 1 3/4 by 3 1/2. See Dimensional lumber. Rmhermen 13:24, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)

Hi

Well, Hi, yes, its good to talk. You said

I feel like I came down hard on some of your edits once or twice,...

well, if you did, I certainly failed to take notice, and have no memory of such. FWIW, I know that I do sometimes introduce errors during edits; sometimes I catch these within minutes, sometimes within hours, sometimes, within days, sometimes ...never. Sometimes, some of these errors are major conceptual bloopers... No doubt, you'll see future edits from me that look questionable; call them out; I know I'm fallible and won't take it badly.

BTW, do you publish on arxiv.org? I've been casually working on a few papers, and wanted to post them there, but do not have any connections into an active community. linas 2 July 2005 15:16 (UTC)

Templates

I posted a request for discussion of the four templates we discussed at Talk:Transcendental number to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics, together with some of your arguments. Hope this will generate some discussion. I wonder if you can follow it too. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 03:25, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Antiderivatives

Lethe, what did you mean? Simply put, because antiderivatives and integrals are not the same thing. I think they deserve separate articles, although certainly a discussion of how they are related belongs in each article (which there currently is). Remember that it is only by the deep result of the Fundamental theorem of calculus that the seemingly otherwise unrelated concepts of integration and antidifferentiation end up being connected. and for certain classes of functions, this connection can't be made, because some functions have integrals, but not antiderivatives (within the appropriate domain). So the connection given by the Fundamental Theorem is deep and important, but it does not mean that the two ideas are exactly equivalent. -Lethe | Talk 01:04, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC) A function which has an integral always has an antiderivative - the same antiderivative which comes out of the Fundamental Theorem. Not all of these antiderivatives are expressible, but they all exist, because the derivative of the formula of the theorem is the function.

But of course you're right that an integral and antiderivative are altogether different. Like I said in Integral, an integral may imply a means for computing it, but to say that an integral is the same as the means for computing it is to "glide through"...--VKokielov 22:55, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

compact disambiguation

Hi Lethe. If the only issue you had with my edit on compact was the omission of compact car, i will re-revert it, including the link of course. If there were other issues, please let me know. greetings, --Lenthe 22:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Newbies

You have correctly understood an analogy, duly marked as not wholly serious, about a policy we have both read. So? Septentrionalis 21:10, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Stress-energy tensor again

Hi, Lethe, remember your proposal to merge energy-momentum density into this article? I wasn't even wikiborn back in Jan 2005, but I seem to have independently come to same glaringly obvious conclusion (just put back merger template). Why didn't the merger take place last time?---CH (talk) 22:43, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Homework

Question to Hydnjo: did I commit a faux pas by doing what's probably someone's homework?

No. Not at all. I was just calling attention to the obvious. Sometimes I think that folks are getting a free ride from us which does us no harm, on the contrary, shows our willingness to help out. For me personally, I judge each question individually. If I think that I'm showing someone how to fish rather than giving them a handout, then I will answer accordingly. Just use your own judgement. I didn't mean to suggest that you were doing anything wrong and my sincere apology for coming across otherwise. Please continue to be as helpful as you see fit. I feel badly and I apologize if my comments intimidated you in any way.  :-) hydnjo talk 01:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
And also, I know how wonderful you must feel if you can contribute to someone's understanding of Mathematics. ;-) hydnjo talk 02:12, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

User categorization

Greetings, Lethe! Please accept this message as an invitation to categorize your user page in the category Category:Wikipedians in Wisconsin and removing your name from the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Wisconsin page. The page will be removed when all users have been removed. Even if you do not wish to be placed in a category, could you take a moment to remove your name from the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Wisconsin page? Thanks!!

To add your name to the category, please use the tag [[Category:Wikipedians in Wisconsin|Lethe]] to ensure proper sorting.

For more information, please see Wikipedia:User categorisation and Category:Wikipedians by location. -- Roby Wayne Talk • Hist 04:11, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Xserve RAID

Just noticed your recent edit to Apple Macintosh, about the Intel-based Xserve RAID. Would you mind updating the Xserve RAID with this information? I don't really know much about this subject, and although I could find sources confirming that it uses an Intel chip, I couldn't find enough to confidently update our Xserve RAID page. Thanks. AlistairMcMillan 20:09, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Translated into Greek

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_el-0 Thanks for giving me something to do for a few minutes :P. Although I did find teh "It's all Greek to me" comment quite clever ;). -- HawkeyE 08:19, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Hilbert Space

What exactly is wrong with my pop article on Hilbert space? It's not very civil of you to smear people as "cranks" . I have a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California and was the first to predict the now discovered supersolid as other physicists are now beginning to affirm. Jack Sarfatti JackSarfatti 05:58, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Dual Space

Hi Lethe, my name is Trieu. I had made some minor changes at Dual space. I added a small example and exchange locations between "covariance" and "contravariance". Am I correct? Could you please help me to modify them if my previous modification is wrong.

Thanks.

~~ Thanks for enlighten me :-) I am a little bit better than before about those. Tensor brought to me many confusions. Trieu 07:03, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Peano axioms

People seem to be bickering over little wording issues here, but 800-pound elephant is that the article still has no account of (first-order) Peano arithmetic. Or worse, it has a misleading account--it's possible to infer that you can get Peano arithmetic just by replacing the induction axiom with an induction schema restricted to properties definable by first-order formulas, and that's just wrong: You have to add multiplication to the language and add axioms that make it work. I admit I've been reluctant to do it myself because of the technical difficulty of explaining what the new induction schema exactly is (unfortunately the arithmetical hierarchy article is in very bad shape). --Trovatore 07:23, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Lethe/list of categories

Greetings. You had expressed concern about the width of your category table. While looking, I noticed a few minor issues that I took the liberty of tinkering with. As a rule I consider a user's sub-pages as untouchable, so I hope you will forgive the intrusion and revert if you object. I agree that the width is excessive, and have two possible strategies to suggest.

  • One possibility is to transpose. Each column is a category; each row, a property. To manage the width, break the large table into a series of tables, each with a limited number of names. This permits more freedom for the property entries, and allows the number of properties and the number of category names to grow. However, adding a category becomes more unpleasant, for two reasons: (1) it's more work to add a column than a row, and (2) all following categories must be moved around. So, hell for editors, nice for readers.
  • Alternatively, notice that most of the width comes from column headings. Most of the entries are empty, Y, N, or otherwise brief. Use footnotes or some other abbreviation scheme for the columns; the width should shrink dramatically. At the same time, bust up the long table into shorter chunks so a reader needn't scroll to the top to see the column labels. This approach is nice for editors, and not too bad for readers. However, it does limit the width of property entries, and the number of properties.

With a little automated help, the first option wins; otherwise, the second is a quick and dirty compromise. Here's an example.

Legend

Category Objects morphisms conc /,⊂ ×,co =,co i,t,z + → ⊗ ccc comments
Ab abelian groups group homomorphisms Y Y,Y Y,Y Y,Y 0 Ab Y N
Adj small categories adjunctions N N
K-Alg algebras over field K homomorphisms Y Y Y 0 Ab Y Y N a full subcategory of R-Mod
AlgSet/K algebraic sets regular maps Y Y,Y (?) Y,Y (?) N N N
Bool Boolean algebras homomorphisms Y Y,? N Y
CAb compact abelian groups group homomorphisms Y Ab Y
Cat small categories functors Y1 Y,?  ?,1,? N Y Y Y with natural transformations, this actually forms a 2-category
CGHaus compactly generated Hausdorff spaces Y N N Y Y this category is used as a replacement for Top which has the benefit of being Cartesian closed

Notes:

Probably you can do better, but this shows the benefit of short labels. --KSmrqT 14:49, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Hi KSmirq. So I gather that you think the table is a good idea? I think there were some who would have preferred just a simple list. That gave me second thoughts about what it should look like before the move into article space. Also, another reason that I haven't moved this into article space is that I think it's too unusable. Partly because the table is too wide or whatever, but also because I've been trying to fill out the table for more categories than I know off the top of my head, and I want to be careful that I don't introduce any errors (though I know that I already have). So you don't have to worry about editing, I don't mind. I just want to see the list get to a usable state. Because of the unweildiness of the table, I've been doing most of the editing offline with a tabbed text document, so if any reversions happen, that'll be the reason.
Regarding your suggestion: I do not like the idea of transposing the table at all, but I love the idea of symbols in the column headers, and I think I will implement it. Thank you! Let me suggest to you another idea that I had about the too big table. It has redundancy, for example a category is complete if it has equalizers and products. I still want to have both columns, as both would be useful, but my idea was this: split the table into two parts, a table of sort of "local properties" about particular objects and morphisms (what's the terminal object, what's the product, etc); and another about sort of "global properties" about the whole category (concrete, complete, monoidal, cartesian closed, etc). What would you think of that? Anyway, I think first let's implement your suggestion about the symbols, and see how it goes.
Oh, there's another problem: I've been putting things like "y/y" in the table to keep the columns as narrow as possible. I've been wikifying those when applicable, for example wikilink the "y" under product for groups to direct product, but I'd like to be able to indicate what the products, equalizers, exponential objects, etc are without there necessarily being an article. For example, I want to indicate that the terminal and initial objects in Top(X) are X and ∅, respectively. But there isn't (nor could there be in any sensible way) an article for the notion of "the whole space" as an open set in a topology, so I can't link it. And I can't write it without making the column too wide. So, I dunno!
Anyway, thanks for your comments and help. I'd let my table stagnate a little lately, after my initial work. I'll see if I can get some more done on it. -lethe talk 21:15, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Algebraic structure

Hi, Lethe! I don't have any problem with your edit to algebraic structure, but I find your edit summary puzzling. Since I'm responsible for the current layout, maybe I can explain... a division ring is not an algebraic structure in the sense of Universal Algebra, since the division ring axioms are not all identities. Division rings are, however, algebraic structures in a broader sense that includes integral domains and fields, and I think the article makes the distinction between the two sections clear. As for groups, yes, they're algebraic structures in every sense of the phrase: sets with operations of arity 0, 1, and 2 satisfying certain identities. Do you agree? Melchoir 22:45, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

E=mc squared etc.

We both want what is best for wikipedia. Neither of us wants to argue/fight/revert-war. Let's find some third party that we agree knows physics to settle this. I'm trying to have less to do with wikipedia these days. I'm easy with regard to how stuff is displayed. Help me feel comfortable with editing less ... THANK YOU !!!! WAS 4.250 23:55, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

You remember me

Yea, I did use sciforums a looong time ago. I hope I didn't piss you off... there were some pretty heated discussions there. I use this basic screenname for everything I do online. Fresheneesz 03:30, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Boundary, again

Hi Lethe. Again on the same topic. You wrote at boundary (topology) that for a manifold with boundary, its boundary in the topological sense coincides with its boundary in the sense of the set of points whose neighbourhoods are not diffeomorphic to an open disk. I don't think that's true, and you wrote that right below in the article.

That is, if one considers the closed unit disk as a manifold, then its topological boundary is empty, while its boundary viewed as a manifold is the circle. Wonder what you think. You can reply here. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:20, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi Oleg. You're absolutely right: a manifold, as a topological space, itself has no boundary. I realized this a short while ago, and was in the edit window fixing it when I noticed your new message alert. Take a look at my revision in a few minutes, I'm correcting it now, and see what you think. But I'm wondering if I'm perhaps stretching too far at this point though; perhaps it would be better to just state that the two notions of boundary are different, rather than do so much work to show that they can be considered the same. -lethe talk 02:39, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Actually I would agree with your latter statement; I think some of the material you put is too much for that article. Just stating that one should not confuse the two notions of boundary should be enough I would say. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:45, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
I think we agree. I knew it even while I was writing it that I had gotten in over my head. Take a look at the newly cut version, if you're still watching. -lethe talk 13:38, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
Of course I am watching! :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:49, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Maths reference desk

I just wanted to thank you for creating Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics. To be honest, I had my doubts about it, seeing how few questions on maths were asked at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science, but just creating the page seems to have induced many questions. Good job! -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:21, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I second that. Dmharvey 14:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Yep, seems helpful. A clone of the sci.math newsgroup more people may find. --KSmrqT 09:22, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I can under stand your initial doubtfulness. I felt hesitant about it in the first place for the specific reason that we didn't really need it; the math traffic was quite light. My hope was that it would justify its own existence in that if math had its own quiet place to live, more math could be asked, and math people who may not want to watch a noisy RD might still watch this one. I think it's done that. Anyway, I'm glad you like it. I like it to. -lethe talk 13:32, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

English/Greek pronunciation

I enjoyed finding English words of Greek origin through your talk page. One thing not discussed there, that I find interesting, is pronunciation. The example that comes to mind is gastrocnemius, listed in AHED as having the syllable boundary between the c and n, clearly violating its Greek origins. Yet medical terminology uses "gastro" in other words as a unit, so you'd think pronunciation would separate the semantic units. Do you know of other such examples? --KSmrqT 09:22, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll bet this will happen any time you get a vowel leading a consonant pair that can't be said in English. Greek has a few of those: kn, gn, pt, phth. When these are initial, we just drop the first consonant, but when there is a vowel, we can put the first consonant in a different syllable. Here are some candidate examples: agnostic, archaeopteryx, Neoptolemus (this is a name, not really a word in English, but its pronunciation in English still exhibits the phenomenon). I think this also happens with the English pronunciation of the German Fahrvergnügen, from the VW commercials, right? Probably others as well. -lethe talk 13:32, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Oooh, how about philadelphia? it's pronounced like phila-delphia, when it should be phil-adelphia.lethe talk 13:38, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, some nice examples, especially agnostic and archæopteryx. If your theory is right, then Ngorongoro Crater must completely baffle English-speakers! I do think Philadelphia is borderline; there's a syllable split, [fɪl.ə.ˈdɛl.fi.ə], whether the semantics is split properly or not; and there's both a South Jersey restaurant and a notorious communications firm named Adelphia. (Wouldn't the Greek stress go on the antepenultimate syllable, the same as the English pronunciation?) --KSmrqT 14:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, Philadelphia is probably not an example, you're right. There isn't a pair of consonants there eligible for splitting. I'm also not so hot on archaeopteryx and Neoptolomus now. While in English, we can't lead a syllable with "pt", we can end them. "apt" is a perfectly cromulent English word for example. Agnosia/agnostic is probably still good. Seems like there should be others with the -gnos- root, but I didn't come up with any. Maybe apoplexy is another. -lethe talk 16:21, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Please allow me to interrupt. I've always been wondering how English people pronounce chthonic. I've seen it used in written text (it means, connected to the underworld, as in the realm of Hades), but nobody has dared to pronounce it in my presence. About "pt", there are many names beginning with this combination, like Ptolemy and pterosaur, see [2] for a more extensive list.
It was a big surprise for me when I moved from Holland to England that the English pronounce Greek in a different way than the Dutch. I remember hearing some English speaking about Zeus and it took me a long time to understand what they were talking about. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 18:06, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
If you'll settle for an American (I'm sure the English say the same), I'll tell you that all Greek "th"s are pronounced as an IPA [θ] (voiceless dental fricative) and all Greek "ch"s are prounced as [k] since we can't do the velar fricative [x] (which I think is how other languages pronounce Greek "ch", is it so for Dutch?) Thus chthonic is pronounced [ˈkθɒnɪk] (an Englishman would probably have a different vowel in there). Same consonant cluster as icthyology. Or "back-throw" (which, as far as I know, is not a real word). The initial [k] in chtonic can also be dropped in English. -lethe talk 18:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
PS I always had fun saying phenolphthalein.

Arabic numerals name change

Hi Lethe! Thanks for voting on Talk:Hindu-Arabic numerals. You might like to take a look at the reasons we had for the change earlier, which got lost in the lengthy text. I've put it in the beginning of the vote here. Thanks a lot! deeptrivia (talk) 19:17, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Yep! It's kinda depressing for me too! When I saw this article first, I just thought someone has named it Arabic numerals out of ignorance (eg Here an editor talks about the fact that the history of these numerals is not taught in the US, while another says that in Brazil they are known as Hindu-Arabic numerals. Certainly, in Indian English (every sixth person in the world in Indian), "Arabic numerals" is little known, and the term is only used colloquially outside India.) We were aware of the common usage of "Arabic numerals", but after taking all factors into account, we chose to rename it Hindu-Arabic. Honestly, I don't know why despite that lengthy discussion to arrive at consensus, the question has been opened again. Nobody even asked for it. The user to went to the admin had an entirely different problem. deeptrivia (talk) 21:16, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
Whoa! hang on, are you saying that you eventually decided on the move because of Indian English usage, Brazilian Portuguese usage, and the fact that India has a large total population? Those are totally inappropriate reasons for the move. -lethe talk 21:34, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

all of mathematics in FOL?

I'm not going to engage in an edit war about "all" versus "virtually all", but show me any credible counterexample in classical mathematics... Randall Holmes 17:16, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

(the topology counterexample that I eliminated is wrong-headed; I'm a former topologist, and I know...)

Well, it probably makes a difference whether you mean all mathematics or just "classical mathematics" (the latter of which might be first order by definition). It just seems to me that making an absolute claim that all mathematics will invite controversy. People who like Peano's second order axioms or who do second order mathematical logic will come in indignant that we don't consider them mathemaiticians. It's cheap to soften the language a little bit. It would be nice if somewhere in the article there were a section about things that cannot be expressed in FOL, and their relation to mathematics. -lethe talk 17:24, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree that it is safer to make the milder claim. Classical mathematics does not have to be "first-order" per se (and constructivist mathematics is also de facto formalized in (intuitionistic) first-order logic). I actually rather like second-order logic, but note that everything that can actually be proved in practice in second order logic can also be proved in the multi-sorted first-order theory over the same domain in which a sort of sets is added with suitable properties: the semantics of second-order logic are stronger in a (very interesting) theoretical sense, but they are not stronger in any effective sense. Randall Holmes 18:19, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Your editing of the Sarfatti page

In the criticism part, the point is that Sarfatti denies that he ever contacted a critic's employer to have the critic "dismissed". Sarfatti told me that is simply a false rumor. Is there any evidence for that allegation Sarfatti says is simply not true? :-) ~~RMC3

I do have to come clean. The sentence "He has been known to contact employers of his critics to call for their dismissals" was added by me in this edit. I added it with the knowledge that Sarfatti contacted employers of his critics on several occasions. But I haven't read any of those correspondences personally, so I can't personally attest to what was said in them, so it's hearsay on my part. Even worse, when I reviewed it, it seems that no one actually said "dismissal", so that part in particular was pure fabrication on my part. I fabricated slander against Sarfatti, unintentionally. I do apologize for that. That's why I softened the language. I hope the new version is more acceptable. If not, please feel free to contact me with your objections. -lethe talk 08:37, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Question

So, are you now going to visit all the talk page modifying your sig? I thought you were busy prodcusing another discontinuous linear map! :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:57, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, right now I'm rewriting the article on locally convex topological vector space, which I find to be in a very unreadable state. As soon as I'm finished with that, I'm going to hit discontinuous linear map. I'm not sure what I'm doing with my sig. I think I'm going to do a couple of those a day until they're all done. -lethe talk 22:13, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
I'll piggyback here with a thought and a question. The thought is that instead of
"lethe talk"
you could use
"lethe talk"
with the sup tags bracketing the whole link. This puts the underline in superscript position, which my eye prefers. The question is, why link to a /sig page instead of the usual? --KSmrqT 23:17, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
I like your suggestion, and I've adopted it. Thanks! As for why I'm doing it, well I'm trying to keep track of talk pages where I've been involved. Mostly questions I've asked, but other discussions as well. Having all my signatures point to a different page will help me do that. By the way, this is the 50th comment on my talk page, which means tomorrow I'm going to archive this page. Finally! -lethe talk 09:54, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
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