User talk:Robert Merkel/archive 3

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Hi Robert, i just created a 3D badminton court, I'm not sure what to do with the 2D Court which you have created. I can also upload a larger version of 3D badminton court i've done, it's in max format on my computer. I'm looking forward to get this file in to SVG or similiar, i ain't no sure how.

That's a nifty piece of work. I'm not sure it's actually any clearer than the 2D version, though. Anyway, if you think your version is better (and I'm a very non-visual kind of person so I'm a terrible judge of such things), just remove minefrom the badminton page and replace it with a link to the 2d diagram as "2D diagram of a badminton court" or something. --Robert Merkel 02:01, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] WikiProject Melbourne

Hi, Robert. Seeing as you've listed yourself at Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Australia as being from Melbourne, why don't you drop by the WikiProject Melbourne and help add something to the Wikipedia about our city?

Be sure to visit the Project talk page, and if you are interested, you can become a member.

Here are some open WikiProject Melbourne tasks:
Suburbs: West Footscray, St Kilda, Broadmeadows, Sunshine, Caulfield North
Landmarks: Rippon Lea Estate, Como Mansion, Queen Victoria Market, Rosie's Van
Events: Fashion Festival, Film Festival, Writer's Festival 2006 Commonwealth Games
Railways: Healesville line, Rosstown Railway, Whittlesea line, St Kilda line, Port Melbourne line
Stations: Dandenong , Footscray, Watergardens, Epping, Ormond
Tramways: 24, 27, 30, 31, City Circle, 42, 48, 55, 57, 59, 67, 86, 108
Streets: Lonsdale Street, Toorak Road, King Street
People: Charles Grimes, Alfred Felton, Charles Hotham, Reg Ansett
Institutions: Melbourne Maritime Museum, Scienceworks Museum, Royal Melbourne Show
Organisations: Melbourne City Council, Save Our Suburbs, Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board
Edit or discuss this list.

TPK 13:48, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC) (My talk page is at User talk:Hypernovean).

Subject Guttenburg resolved, I hope.Faedra 11:04, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC) : Thanks for comment.

Robert, I noticed you're responsible for the diagram of a basketball goal. Pretty good job, but one minor error: The distance between the floor and the bottom of the backboard is 2.90 m, not 3.05 m. The measurement of 3.05 m (10 ft) is the distance between the floor and the rim. Dale Arnett 05:16, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Noted. I'll fix it in the not too distant future, or you can use Sodipodi to do it. --Robert Merkel 07:57, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Fixed. --Robert Merkel 11:09, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Hume highway maps...

The pleasure is mine, thanks Fikri 10:26, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The road distances and shields are hand-drawn using Powerpoint and converted to jpeg with 60% compression ratio. A lot of editing is actually done using Windows' bog-standard Paint. Irfanview and OpenOffice Draw is also used for final cropping and editing. As the maps are originally created in bitmap format, the filesize is huge. Unfortunately, I do not have broadband acess. I used the colour conventions found in the average paper road-maps. Currently the source files are scattered in my hard disks. If I come around to organizing them I'll upload them all... Cheers... Fikri 15:29, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Victoria highway maps...

Have a look at the self-drawn Victorian maps in List of Australian highways, hope you find it useful! Fikri 09:02, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Greetings. I cordially invite you to read my response at Talk:Robert Bourassa's speech on the end of the Meech Lake Accord. Thanks. --Liberlogos 14:26, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] drug cheats

Hi Robert, I posted my answer on the talk page.Category talk:Drugs cheats in athletics. thanx Scraggy4 04:49, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Drugs in sport rtcl

Hi Robert, I have have written an rtcl Drugs in sport tonight. It still needs loads of work because the subject is so vast. In will need lots of sub articles which I am hoping other people may contribute to relating to sport from their particular part of the world or with more specialist knowledge of different sports. regards Scraggy4 22:18, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Philip Emeagwali

Hi Robert, I found your Philip Emeagwali article quite interesting. Thanks for writing it. There is something else I am wondering about, though, that you did not address. On Emeagwali's personal website and in dozens of other sources are claims that Emeagwali achieved the "world's fastest computation" or built the "fastest computer on earth." Do you know if such reports have any truthful basis?

As far as I'm aware, he's never designed or built a computer in his life. As to the other claim, it does bear some resemblance to the truth, but it doesn't appear to be particularly significant. As far as I can recall when I looked this stuff up (and, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get all the details; the journal article describing the awards the year he won wasn't in my university library) , the Gordon Bell prize he won was for a numerical achievement; the highest number of floating point operations per second achieved when using the computer for a particular application domain (can't remember what they actually called it). In other words, at the time he won the award, he had his computer cranking over more numbers per second for doing geophysical simulations than anyone else had in the past.
Why aren't I impressed, then? Computer hardware gets faster every year; so (to simplify somewhat) if you run last year's program on this year's computer you'll be faster by default. It's like when F1 drivers continually break old lap records year on year at the tracks they race on; it's just the advance of technology rather than evidence of any specific genius in the driver. Secondly, Emeagwali wasn't working in the dark; he had access to everybody else's ideas from the immediate past because in this domain pretty much everything gets published in the conferences and journals. An incremental improvement on somebody else's idea, or even just the application of somebody else's idea on the very fast Connection Machine he was using, is enough to go faster than last year. The performance of Emeagwali's program was exceeded by next year's winner (he entered again and didn't win IIRC).
So how did Emeagwali make his computation go faster than last year's efforts? I honestly don't know because, like the Wikipedia article says, he hasn't published any papers (the "technical papers" on his website appear to be gibberish and don't directly relate to how he won the award). The fact that he's published no papers also means his ideas, if he actually had any, have had zero influence on the further development of supercomputing. A significant researcher is one whose work influences others.
Finally, in the grubby racist underworld of parts of the alt hierachy of USENET, in between racist bile of the worst kind there were allegations made (as best I can recall, it's been a while since I found this in Google Groups) that Emeagwali had lobbied very hard for the Gordon Bell prize and the prize committee were not particularly happy about giving him the award. The source of such allegations means that they should be taken with a truckload of salt, but given the weirdness surrounding his failed PhD and the complete lack of publication they become slightly more plausible.
If you can provide me with a specific URL where this claim is made I might be able to work it, and a response, into the article, if I can raise the enthusiasm.
I find what Emeagwali has done very depressing, quite frankly. He seems to be some kind of Nigerian national hero, and I wonder what it's going to do to that country's self-confidence when they find out their famous computer genius is a fraud. Still, it's an indictment of the Nigerian press (not to mention the African-American press) that he's been able to get away with it for so long. --Robert Merkel 08:55, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

...

...

OK. It now appears that Emeagwali's "fastest computation" boast has no legitimate basis.[1]

The claim does appear 38 times on the Emeagwali personal site. Perhaps he thought it would become true if he repeated it enough times?




Every other sentence in this biography contains an intentional lie. My edits removed those "factual inaccuracies" and references to websites of fictious authors. This is a devious biographical writing (adapted from hate newsgroups postings) that is full ouright lies, superficialities, irrelevancies, inaccuracies, errors, omissions, overemphasis

on trivialites, and an obvious lack of understanding of the subject matter, such as partial differential equations, numerical approximations, message-passing, network theory, laws of physics.

As I see it, the problem is an "echo chamber" effect or groupthink or like minded people reinforcing their racial biases while refusing to do basic fact-checking. The result is that a scientific fact is differents from wiki facts.

Check your facts!

Remember the WIKI rule: "Please cite your sources so others can check your work." You cited fictitious and anonymous authors, ignoring documents from the IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, The White House, seven universities (including the University of Michigan), dozens of books in Amazon.com Don't reintroduce these factual inaccuracies. They will be deleted!

Below are numerous examples of factual inaccuracies. There are many many more inaccuracies to be revealed later.

FALSE STATEMENT (first sentence)

He "was one of five winners of the 1989 Gordon Bell prize."

THE FACT:

Emeagwali did not share the Gordon Bell Prize with five people. He won it alone.

You have given honorary authorship to five unknown and unnamed scientists. He was the only individual to win the Gordon Bell Prize alone while eight researchers from MIT shared the other Gordon Bell Prize. The fact is that an 8-man MIT team tied with only one-man, but you revised it to read that he shared with five people.




FACT CHECK on SECOND PARAGRAGH

You quoted two fictitious authors (Ezeilo and anonymous) and ignored published testimonials from leading computer scientist and ignored the President of the United States who (you'll guess) had computer scientists review the transcript of his televised speech for technical accuracy.

The NEW AFRICAN is the TIME magazine of Africa. You ignored their ranking of Emeagwali but choose to quote websites

published by anonymous authors.


FALSE STATEMENT

"Emeagwali heavily promotes himself as a speaker for conferences."

FACT CHECK He declines most speaking engagements and has never spoken in Africa in 31 years.


FALSE STATEMENT

A large number of websites [2] [3] named after famous inventors and other great achievers, particularly African ones, have been created to promote Emeagwali. They feature brief biographies of them (copied verbatim from sources such as Project Gutenberg public domain texts and the World Book Encyclopedia), surrounded by many links to Emeagwali's site.

The large number of links to Emeagwali's main site also boosts the prominence of it in search engines. The relevant domain name whois records list Donita Brown, Emeagwali's wife, as the technical and administrative contact.

FACT CHECK

According to Google, it is impossible for a billion low PageRank pages to boost a website that is already ranked high.


FACT CHECK

The WHOIS record does not list Donita Brown in the your "large number of websites." And his wedding page did not list Donita Brown either. Only Wiki lists Donita Brown as his wife.


FALSE STATEMENT

According to his website, Emeagwali was born in a "remote Nigerian village" in 1954. He dropped out of school in 1967 because of the Nigerian civil war. When he turned fourteen, he was conscripted into the Biafran army. After the end of the war, He completed a high-school equivalency through self-study and came to the United States to study at university under a scholarship scheme.

FACT CHECK

You left out four graduate degrees in four different fields .... PLEASE CONTINUE to ENLIGHTEN US ... You intentionally skipped four graduate degrees ...

Thomas Edison (the greatest American inventor of the 20th century) had only sixth-grade education and is found of stating that that he would rather hire a hard worker than a college graduate. Albert Einstein (Time magazine's Person of the Century) did not even have four graduate degrees. And Isaac Newton graduated at the bottom of his class. Your revered Tim Berneers Lee is an MIT professor that never went to graduate school. You know that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and half of leading computer pioneers merely earned a high school diploma.


FALSE STATEMENT

Emeagwali studied for a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan from 1987 through 1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and was thus not awarded the degree. Emeagwali filed a court challenge, claiming that the decision was a violation of his civil rights and that the university had discriminated against him in several ways because of his race. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan state Court of Appeals.

FACT CHECK

There were no thesis "internal examiners." The "external examiners" did not reject his thesis. Instead, they awarded it the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize. [Now that I have named the external examiners and I look forward to your priving me wrong by naming the internal examiners and renaming the external examiners.]


FACT CHECK

There is not no lawsuit for a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering. A complaint for a denied "Ph.D. degree in civil engineering" must be filed with a lower court. Find an original complaint and this information will be corrected. In the real world primary document takes precedence over secondary documents. The primary documents were ignored in favor of a secondary document that contradicts what was in the primary document.

FACT CHECK

We found that a dozen University of Michigan publications hailed Emeagwali as a genius whom the university officials spent three years courting. In the citiation below, the university's flagship publication called "Michigan Today" (February 1991) devoted a special issue on his work. The latter issue on Emeagwali was mailed to the university's 400,000 alumni.


FALSE STATEMENT

Emeagwali, on his website, claims that the Gordon Bell prize has been called "supercomputing's Nobel Prize".

While it is a significant prize in the relatively narrow field of supercomputing, it is not in any way comparable in financial rewards, prestige, or recognition to the Nobel Prizes.

FACT CHECK

Supercomputing is not a "narrow field." Historically, the supercomputer of today is the computer of tomorrow. The supercomputer is to the computer what the heavy champion is to boxing. The latter may not be pound-for-pound the best fighter, but punch-for-punch he is the toughest.

FACT CHECK

The Gordon Bell prize has $5,000 while the Turing has $25,000 while the Nobel Prize has one million dollars. The Field's Medal is called the Nobel Prize of mathematics yet it has zero financial reward.


FALSE STATEMENT

"In the wider field of computing, the Turing Award is regarded as by far the most prestigious award."


FACT CHECK

You are comparing apples and oranges, the Turing Award is not a supercomputing award. The Turing has a 15-year waiting period but you expect Emeagwali to do Turing prize-winning discovery while in high school and earn the Turing Award in 1989 at the ripe old age of 34. For the record, the Gordon Bell prize is supercomputing's top prize and by default the Nobel Prize of supercomputing. The IEEE Gordon Bell Prize-winning works are published in IEEE publications and publicly defended at the annual Supercomputing conference which draws 10,000 attendees. The Turing Award is a private closed-door selection process.


FALSE STATEMENT

Emeagwali also claims to have performed the "world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989" [4]. This is false;

FACT CHECK

Please cite your sources. The keyword is "1989." Your proof is a latter date. He explained his "world's fastest computation" at http://emeagwali.com/speeches/globalization/the-truth-about-globalization/my-supercomputer-discovery.pdf


FALSE STATEMENT

Some web sites state that he holds patents, for instance an article at the Lemelson-MIT inventor program [5], states that he "holds more than 30 patents". He is not listed in the USPTO patent database, which holds fully searchable records of all US patents dating back to 1976, nor in its pending application database, as of April 2004.


FACT CHECK

Your key phrase is "Some web sites." Now tell us what he claimed in his website [6] or in his 1057-page Gordon Bell Prize report or in his off-line interviews and writings. One could find a website out of 50,000 inauthorized website. [Even Bill Clinton maintains several unauthorized blogs written by conservative republican webmasters].


FACT CHECK

His biography [emeagwali.info] claimed "41 discoveries" while your secondary sources claimed "30 patents." However, you prefer to cite your secondary sources. You did not devote a sentence to any of the "41 discoveries."

Do you understand the difference between a "discovery" and an "invention?" Do you understand that it was illegal to patent discoveries in the United States of America. You have to search in countries that allow the patenting of discoveries.

FALSE STATEMENT

"In subsequent years, various supercomputers have been used to perform computations far faster and more cost-effectively than Emeagwali as the inevitable result of Moore's Law and improvement in programming techniques."

FACT CHECK

Emeagwali programmed 65,536 processors to outperform supercomputers. That's not "Moore's Law." The most powerful supercomputer built by IBM also uses 65,536, not powered by Moore's Law


ANOTHER FICITIOUS CITATION


FACT CHECK

Your primary source author "Chioma Ezeilo" claims to live in Utah. Yet extensive search of United States driving records/databases shows that it was a fictitious person. existed. Nigerian newsgroups are speculating that Chioma Ezeilo is a pen-name for a person indirectly responsible for the death of eight African villagers.


ANOTHER FICITIOUS CITATION

This "Black Inventions Myth" website is written by an anonymous author who debunked the contributions of nearly all significant black inventors. The only true inventors, we are led to believe, are white geniuses such as like Thomas Edison "the father of the light buld."

FACT CHECK

A "White Inventions Myth" site could also debunk any major white inventor. Take for example, Thomas Edison. His patent on the light bulb was declared null and void by a United States court, three years after it was issued.


FALSE STATEMENT

COURT CASE

You've made this a legal biography, instead of scientific biography


FACT CHECK

You searched for papers and ended up writing about a complaint that was never filed in any United States court of law.


FALSE STATEMENT

A large number of websites [1] (http://www.leonardo-davinci.info/leonardo-da-vinci/) [2] (http://nelson-mandela.info/nelson-mandela/nelson-rolihlahla-mandela-biography-picture-quote-speech-apartheid-photo-biografia-7.shtml) named after famous inventors and other great achievers, particularly African ones, have been created to promote Emeagwali. They feature brief biographies of them (copied verbatim from sources such as Project Gutenberg public domain texts and the World Book Encyclopedia), surrounded by many links to Emeagwali's site. The large number of links to Emeagwali's main site also boosts the prominence of it in search engines. The relevant domain name WHOIS record list Donita Brown, Emeagwali's wife, as the technical and administrative contact.


FACT CHECK

Google will spend billions on these public domain texts. He was thinking ahead of google.


FACT CHECK

You never bothered to check WHOIS. Did you? The whois fact is that only "emeagwali" domains are owned by Donita Brown.


FALSE STATEMENT

Self Promotion -- Alfred Nobel, Gordon Bell and others who named prizes after themselves are more self-promoting than the recipients of the awards. Gordon Bell should have named his awards after the "IEEE," instead of self-promoting his name. Naming awards after oneself more self-promotion than receiving them.


FALSE STATEMENT

The Nigerian press .... BLAH BLAH ...

FACT CHECK

The Nigerian Press were repeating what IEEE, American and White House told them. Emeagwali has never been to Nigeria in 31 years.

Besides the American press promotes the Wright Brothers while the Brazilian press promotes Santos who achieved the first flight.

The American press promotes Thomas Edison as the father of the light bulb while the British press promotes Joseph Swan as the inventor of the light bulb, even though the US court ruled in favor of Joseph Swan. Alan Turing is promoted by the Gay press as a martyr who committed suicide to avoid trial for child molestation. Do you know why the Gay press promotes Isaac Newton [Hint: he died a bachelor] And so on.


FINALLY

You must check your facts! You have to understand the subject matter and his contributions write a biography that provides both scientific content and context. I will provide additional factual information, including illustrations at a latter date.

[edit] Ain't I a Woman?

I have heard reports of this speech from other sources. It would be good to state who reported it (the speaker was illiterate, so it must have been someone else). Other things to do now, sadly. Mr. Jones 18:05, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Your old Talk: page

The redirect Robert Merkel to User:Robert Merkel has been listed on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion, but there is still (old) content on Talk:Robert Merkel. Would you like to retrieve that content? Thanks! Noel 18:29, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

yes, I would. Im trvelling at the momvent so if you want to delete it in a hurry move it to an appropriate place and paste a link here.--Robert Merkel 12:20, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No rush, take your time - I'll leave it on RFD until you can get the stuff you want from Talk:Robert Merkel. Noel 15:25, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Traumatic Masturbatory Syndrome

Hi Robert! Am very interested in that article you found online "freely." Not available at my location. Would you be willing to e-mail it to me somehow? Thanks. doug22123@yahoo.com Doug22123 00:26, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Done. Hope you find it useful. --Robert Merkel 04:49, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Robert, the ref to TMS is where it is in Masturbation because it is related to the mention of prone masturbation. If the TMS mention is to go lower, so should the description of prone masturbation. Also, it is not only the Sank and Lipsith articles that mention TMS. We have also uncovered the mention by Margolies and the page by doctors on MedLine Plus Medical Encyclopedia that attribute male sexual dysfunction to an atypical masturbatory style. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001954.htm Doug22123 03:54, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Doug, I moved your second question to the article's talk page, which is the appropriate place to discuss it. I have replied there. --Robert Merkel 23:52, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Crisis

Thanks for the wisdom! Intrigue 22:54, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Australian wikipedians' message board

Hi Robert. I've created a page (with an idea blatantly plagiarised from our Irish counterparts) where any interested Australians can get together and coordinate efforts to fill some of the (rather large) holes in Australian content. If you're interested, it's at Wikipedia:Australian wikipedians' notice board. Any assistance you could give would be appreciated. Ambi 05:59, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Data Management Wiki Committee

Thank you for your contribution to one, or more, articles that are now organized under Data management.

Because of your previous intrest, you are recieving an invitation to become a founding member of the Data Management Wiki Committee.

The members, of course, will form and solidify the purpose, rules, officers, etc. but my idea (to kick things off) is to establish a group of us who will take responsiblity to see that the ideas of Data management are promoted and well represented in Wikipedia articles.

If you are willing to join the committee, please go to Category_talk:Data_management and indicate your acceptance of this invitation by placing your three tilde characters in the list.

KeyStroke 01:07, 2004 Sep 25 (UTC)

[edit] Sipwith article

Yes, by all means, I'd like a copy. Email to dpbsmith@verizon.net. Thanks in advance. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 03:07, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

P. S. Do you have a copy of the original Sank paper? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 03:07, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] BDO Photos

I noticed that you added those photos to Big Day Out - thanks a bunch. Would you mind if I used this image on Magic Dirt?

Not at all. I hereby place that image in the public domain. More generally, I'm usually going to be happy for any photo on my site to be used in Wikipedia, and I'll usually put it in the public domain, but I want people to ask (like you have) first. --Robert Merkel 21:12, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Yarra river near city

Hi Robert

Just thought I should let you know that I have nominated your photo Image:Yarra river near city medium.jpg for delisting from WP:FPC. Nothing personal I think it is quite an impressive shot, but doesn't really show the subject in comparison with some of the newer featured pictures. Its not a clear cut case. -- Solipsist 13:42, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

No problem, it wasn't my photo anyway :) --Robert Merkel 07:52, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Reply to Godel and God

Thanks for your reply in my user page.

What I was asking for is not a way to escape of attempts to being converted by others, that's not the problem (I can handle those situations with no problem). I just thought it was an interesting thought to use an analogy of Godel's theorem on the subject of god's existence, and I was asking if this was valid or not (that is, if the principle used in the theorem can be applied in any sort of things that try to prove themselves).

But I must disagree to what you say about god and the laws of mathematics: "he wrote them, he can change them"... Hehe, I don't think even he could change pi to any other value.

Anyway, thanks for commenting. — Kieff | Talk 02:54, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Read the arguments in the pages I linked to in more detail. While they don't specifically deal with Godel's theorem, they deal with Christian responses to philosophical arguments against omniscience and omnipotence. Suffice to say they have them, though I don't find them convincing obviously.--Robert Merkel 03:00, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] ADW Vote

The vote for General Secretary of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians has opened. Please visit the page and vote for who you think would make the best choice. --Slowking Man 03:36, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] A sample video

As mentioned on the village pump and on my talk page, I've created a small sample video of an echocardiogram describing one of the features of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

While the original AVI was 382 KB and encoded in the MS-MPEG4 V2 codec, the edited version (just a black overlay of all identifying patient and hospital information) is 3.64 MB and compressed in the Cinepak Codec.

Would you like me to email a copy to you, to see about converting to theora format? Ksheka 12:03, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

Please, hopefully the mail server won't choke on it.
If it does, I might have to arrange an alternative file transfer arrangement. The other question will of course be whether Kino can decode Cinepak, but I guess we'll soon find out :)--Robert Merkel 04:08, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Please send me an email with your email address. Mine is ksheka <at> gmail <dot> com. Ksheka 11:33, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Comments on "AIDS" page?

The reasons behind my posting of that comment which at this point I judge to be very offensive and inappropriate can be summarized by this diagram:

Image:Caffeine molecule.png

I hope that this clears a few things up.

I will refrain from using Wikipedia or heavy/sharp machinery after ingesting a large amount of that molecule in the future. I am very sorry. A person doesn't deserve to die because of one mistake. --NoPetrol 05:06, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Revert mistake

Sorry about that. I had a brain fart and got confused. I've removed the reference to pork barrel. No offense intended! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:05, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] 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 1000 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)[[]] 15:35, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion

Not that I'm not glad to see it go, but technically speaking, according to Wikipedia:Deletion policy, spam is not speedily deletable. Just a friendly clarification! -- ClockworkSoul 03:51, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK. It should be speedily deletable IMO, but I'll save that argument for another time... --Robert Merkel 04:31, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

==Bert Newton== You voted for Bert Newton, this week's Australian Collaboration of the week. Please come and help it become a featured-standard article. Thanks.

Bob can you go through 1999 Australian republic referendum and fix it - a monarchist has been at it and i think you can restore NPOV. PMA 01:08, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'll fix it tonight. Thanks for the vote of confidence. --Robert Merkel 04:00, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Bob thank you - and keep being carefull with User:Skyring - he's a conservative monarchist and keeps trying to insert that POV into articles. PMA 00:31, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Shenzhen "massage"?!

Robert, someone has finally answered those questions that you posed in the talk about the Shenzhen article.

[edit] Message from 70.16.253.130

Hey this is in response to Robert Merkel's question on the rule of three. I am a Wiccan and though I'm only 14 I've learned about this. It's highly stressed. Yes we do believe in the rule of three and what others might call Karma. We don't believe in hell but we do believe that we as humans are responsible for our own actions and will suffer the consequences for bad ones. For example, if I got greedy and decided to do a money spell just because I wanted to go on a shopping spree(which would be a PERSONAL GAIN spell and that is a big no no in Wicca) but say I did this... I might actually get the money, but chances are both my parents would die in a car accident and I would recieve my inheritence. Of course thats an extremely outlandish example I'm just using it so you can understand more clearly. "Three times three what ye sends out comes back to thee." Wicca is a harmless earth based religion but if you aren't careful and you disregard rules and warnings such as the rule of three it can be very dangerous. Sincerely, Emeri P.S. If anyone has any questions I'll answer them just email me at EmeriRose@hotmail.com THank YOu!

This message was originally posted to Robert Merkel by 70.16.253.130, and was moved here by Hadal after deletion. (It seems your older talk page messages were signed with "[[Robert Merkel]]".) —04:31, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sydney Hilton bombing

Hello,

I note that you made a contribution to the ASIO page some time ago. There is a rather nasty revert war going on at the moment with the related Hilton Bombing page user:ambi. She makes no changes, never edits the talk page, but continuously reverts the page. This is of particular concern because she appears to have gotten herslef onto the Arbitration commitee, so this is more important than just the Hilton Bombing page.

Could you please review the page. Please make some (possibly small) contribution to it to indicate your general support.

(But please check the history and be careful to review/contribute to the full page, not a reverted one. The full page is quite long and includes an "Evidence of Misconduct" section.)

Thanks,

Aberglas 05:02, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC) aberglas

I've looked at the page. I'm not an expert on the event, but from what I can tell I think Ambi's justified in preventing you from turning the page into an advocacy page. Ambi was elected to the arbitration committee because she has demonstrated herself to be a reliable contributor who is adept at working with people. --Robert Merkel 13:22, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Thanks, question

Hi;

I see that you fixed the vandalism on the weight training page. When I see stuff like this, I copy and paste the old entry. Is there a better way to revert?

Thanks, Tom Harrison

I prefer to go to the history page, find an unvandalised version, open that up, click the edit button to edit that version, and then save it immediately. --Robert Merkel 22:53, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Emeagwali

Someone vandalised your page on Emeagwali and filled it with typical pseudohistorical crap, so I copied the old & replaced it. Hope you don't mind my taking the liberty, and I just wanted to give you a heads up that someone is being sneaky.

Thank you. Though I did write much of it, it's not "my" page - I don't have any particular right to edit it more than anyone else. Reverting is exactly the right thing to do when faced with an edit that is clearly BS. I continue to monitor the page (to have a look at changes good and bad - several people have contributed useful facts to it). As to the ridiculous claims in that edit, I have my suspicions as to who the "someone" responsible is. If they really had the courage of their convictions that the Emeagwali page was wrong, they'd bring it to wider attention, but they prefer to quietly edit the page every so often, or at most complain on the talk page. --Robert Merkel 06:26, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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