User talk:NorwegianBlue

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Welcome!

Hello, NorwegianBlue, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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 Wikipedia: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! --hydnjo talk 18:37, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed your red sig went blue. See you around I'm sure :-) hydnjo talk 18:37, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

1 Copied from hydnjo's talk
2 Helpme
3 Babelboxes
4 Response from JackofOz
5 I'm to be vacationing as well!
6 Thanks for your review
7 Username change
8 Computer algebra systems (Copied from KSmrq's talk page.)
9 Reference Desk

[edit] Copied from hydnjo's talk

==Thanks for your friendly welcome==

Just one question: when I want to ask a specific user a question, is the right way to do it the way I'm asking you this question now?

Best regards,

--NorwegianBlue 19:29, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, exactly this way. Some users however may choose to reply on their own page in order to keep the conversation (if there is one) intact on one page so you may want to put that user on your watchlist. In the case of this question I'm going to answer on my page and then copy the whole thing to your page which is another way that you might encounter or want to do for whatever reason. I very rarely find a need to do this - just showing you how. Also, it's a good idea to put something in the edit summary even if only a word or two.

Please feel free to ask me anytime you think I can help out. --hydnjo talk 22:14, 25 May 2006 (UTC) addendum: You may find Help:Watching pages useful. --hydnjo talk 22:47, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Helpme

Generally {{helpme}} is to be used with building the encyclopedia (not userpages etc) but I can see you are working on something interesting there.

Place <br clear="all" /> directly above a section header will stop stuff overslapping - have a play with it.

To work on an aritcle in your userspace you can do so on a user subpage. Eg just start User:NorwegianBlue/Sandbox, or User:NorwegianBlue/Ksmrq etc.--Commander Keane 10:42, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:User page has some guidance on what content you can have in your user space. I think the reference desk info would be fine (I acutally have something similar), as long as you don't start turning Wikipedia into your personal webserver.

Anyone (well any logged in user) can create a page in Wikipedia, and your userspace is no exception to that (except things like your monobook.js, only you and admins can edit that).--Commander Keane 13:28, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Babelboxes

Hei! Du kan også benytte Template:User_nb. Kan du foreslå noe betre enn "redaktør"? -- Arvind 23:59, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Det er ikke en stor sak for meg. Gjør gjerne det du synes er best! Jeg mener ikke å endre boksen igjen. -- Arvind 18:28, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Det kan stå som det er. Jeg har funnet min egen løsing for min diskusjonside :-) -- Arvind 21:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Response from JackofOz

Hello, NorwegianBlue. Thank you for the feedback. No matter how hard we try, and no matter how noble our intentions may be, there is almost always a better way. If I didn’t understand that before I became a Wikipedian, I certainly do now. I think your suggested response to Luke’s post is a very good one, and I would certainly adopt it in future.

The nature of a wiki means that editing others’ posts (other than in articles, of course) cannot be absolutely forbidden, but it’s generally frowned upon unless there’s a good reason. Removing emails is a good reason. Formatting to remove large areas of white space is a good reason. Making incomprehensible English comprehensible might be a good reason, but that’s also tricky because it depends on the assumed meaning of the post being the same as the meaning intended by the poster, which cannot be known with certainty unless questions are asked, and answered. So most people prefer to ask what they meant rather than just change it to what they think they meant. In Luke’s case, it was quite clear (to me at least) what he meant. My issue was with the total lack of punctuation, which made it much harder to read than it needed to be. If the tone of my response seemed unnecessarily judgmental, that’s a lesson I need to take heed of.

This is a very common problem with a communication forum that uses words alone, without any of the body language and facial gestures that give human communications the vast majority of their meaning. Although it wasn’t relevant in this case, the most difficult thing to express in a wiki environment is humour. If the speaker prefers to let their humour be subtle or dry (as I do) rather than “in your face”, they have to be prepared to be occasionally misunderstood and inappropriately taken to task. I’ve been down that road more than once as the recipient of such criticism, and I’ve also been the “perpetrator” (where I’ve failed to see the intended humour in another person’s post, and got all righteous about it). That’s where the assume good faith policy comes in. But that good faith policy doesn't mean dropping our standards.

There’s also the question of political correctness, which your question touched on ("Luke might be a very young person, or have a reading/writing disability, and the question could be the result of hard work.") That may very well be true. We certainly don’t want to discourage young people from coming here. And not everyone is fortunate enough to have had as much language training as other people have. I guess I get frustrated at what I see as the dumbing down of language these days. Mobile/cell phones have brought enormous change to how people operate in their daily lives, much of it very good, but text messaging (SMS) has had a huge negative impact on how written language is abbreviated because those habits spill over to other places where they’re inappropriate. All you need to make a good paragraph pretty unreadable is to dispense with capitals, full stops and commas, and insert a small number of spelling errors for good luck. That’s all Luke did, it wasn’t a hanging offence - which is why it wasn’t a huge task to put them back where they belonged. Those small changes made a large difference to the readability of the para. The message I was trying to convey to him was that it was open to him to make those changes himself, rather than leaving it for somebody else to do. What does this have to do with PC? Well, without specific knowledge of a person’s circumstances, I think it’s going too far to try to work out what could possibly explain a poorly punctuated sentence, and then assume that's the case, and by our silence make it seem OK. (I have a similar issue with a lot of redirects, that undermine our language by enabling people to search using a grossly misspelled word and they get taken straight to the relevant page without ever being made aware they have just committed linguistic murder. This is doing a serious disservice to our language.) Maybe Luke does have a learning difficulty. But my preference is not to assume that. I’d rather assume he’s had the “benefit” of modern educational philosophy. It’s not his fault, it’s the fault of our educators. But he still needs to hear that this outcome is not entirely acceptable. If he worked in an office where he had to write letters to customers, he’d soon find out what English standards were expected, or he’d be out of a job. Maybe I’m just an old duffer who thinks that standards still count when in it comes to writing English. Maybe I’m out of step. Who knows? Anyway, those are some of my thoughts about this tricky subject. Thanks for the opportunity to say them. JackofOz 05:54, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I'm to be vacationing as well!

It seems that the blood type MCOTW has come at a bad time for the both of us. I'm going on a month long vacation without the internet at the end of this week. There is a chance that things won't change while we're gone (MCOTW does not promise much improvement!) but if it is not already a featured article, then I propose that we make it so (with help, of course!). I had copied the list of antigens from what had previously been on the page without checking for veracity, so that explains the errors. I will look to find the appropriate nomenclature - I didn't break out my Wintrobe's last night because I thought that pubmed would be enough. I think that sometimes doing sub/superscripts on the internet gets ignored. InvictaHOG 16:02, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I was looking at several articles and haven't seen the subscript notation for K1/K2, though I have seen K₀ more than Kell-null. The one place that it showed up was the hemolytic disease of the newborn page for the Kell antigen created by snowmanradio. I will ask him/her where the notation came from so we can choose to be consistent! InvictaHOG 20:46, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for your review

Hi NorwegianBlue. I just wanted to thank you again for your very helpful review of the chromatophore article. After taking your comments on board, it was promoted to featured article status today without opposition. So thanks again for helping me achieve my goal (and i hope you had a nice wikibreak!). Rockpocket 03:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Username change

As you requested, your username has now been changed from (Old name) to NorwegianBlue. If you haven't done it already, please remember to move your user page and your talk page using the "move" tab on the upper right-hand side of your screen. Redux 23:38, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Computer algebra systems (Copied from KSmrq's talk page.)

Hi KSmrq,

First, I would like to thank you for your work on the maths reference desk. I've read the refdesk regularly for about a year, and am deeply impressed with the way you respond to questions, whether they be on elementary or advanced topics, always with the same patience and insight. A tiny number of questions have been mine, such as this one. Thank you!

Second, I would like to ask your advice about selecting a computer algebra system. I remember your having stated in passing that you used a CAS when arriving at a certain conclusion, and I also believe that you once said that you were a supporter of free software (I'm certain about the first statement, not 100% certain about the second one). I've read the CAS article, and am aware that there are several open source computer algebra systems.

Some background: I'm certainly no mathematician, but from time to time, mostly for the fun of it, do some algebra. Having a CAS available might to help me from doing silly mistakes, and from spending a lot of time in spotting them. Right now, I'm trying to gain a little more insight into mathematical statistics, involving the need of both symbolic and numerical integration. I had access to Maple some time ago, and have also used a trial version of MuPad. Both programs would fit the bill, but I'm looking for a free, open source alternative. For plotting, simulations and computations, I use R. I would greatly appreciate your opinion about whether there are open source alternatives that could be useful to me, and if so, where to start. Thank you. --NorwegianBlue^talk 21:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

PS. The OS'es that I currently use are Windows XP and Kubuntu 6.06. --NorwegianBlue^talk 10:05, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I am an enthusiastic user of computer algebra systems. The landmark original Macsyma system (not the current commercial one) evolved at the MIT AI Lab, which is also where Richard Stallman and the "hacker mentality" of free software began. So, despite the high-priced efforts of Wolfram and Mathematica, CAS and open source are a natural combination.

One interesting effort you might like to explore is SAGE: Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation. You can find a home page at http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/, and download versions for XP and Linux. It incorporates a number of open source projects; and you can find more at Category:Free computer algebra systems. --KSmrq^T 21:40, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, I'll try it out as soon as the download finishes! --NorwegianBlue^talk 10:56, 14 January 2007 (UTC)