User talk:Steverapaport

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Hello there Steverapaport, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Thanks, Maveric149! I think I will stay after all... User:Steverapaport

Your hairless cats, are they really without hair, or is it just that the hair are indeed very short ? I have never seen any of them in real life. Is it a particular species (they seem to have a siamese look) or is it a mutation ? Is it recessive ? (how do you breed them ?) Are they a particularly fragile species or not ? user:anthere

oops, sorry, I finally found the name you give them Sphynx cat. That's very interesting.

They are indeed Sphynx cats, and their hair is very short, ideally verging on nonexistent. As I recently found confirmed on the Ankhamun website, they tend to grow longer hair when they're cold or overweight. (My cats are unfortunately doing just that). You can find many more Sphynx cats on the web, or even in the movies, with Austin Powers. --User:Steverapaport

P.S. They are not particularly fragile: on the contrary they're quite hardy and strong, but should be kept warm of course.

I'll check. They look beautiful really. Like cats quite a lot. Lived surrended by them 'till I got allergic to their protein saliva around 12. Since then, I can only look at them from far away :-((
And, ho, thanks alot for your site wedding pictures. Nice to put faces on friends names sometimes ;-).
I just quickly saw an upload of one of your picture today, while I was adding a link to the fr.wiki; but saw your cats first in march 02 on http://www.ryze.org/view.php?who=petabit

[edit] Utilitarian Ethics

Hi Steve,

Thought it interesting to add a bit to Utilitarian ethics. Mostly to state it was not only about increasing happiness, but also about escaping suffering. Make sense for euthanasia matters I guess. Amitiés. Ant.

[edit] Steve gets threatened for stuff he didn't do

Steve,

On reflection, I can see that when I wrote the following, it could be interpreted as a "threat to ban":

Continually reposting a diatribe in the guise of an article is un-neighborly, and could get you banned.

After all, I am a sysop --something I tend to forget -- not that forgetting is an excuse.

Steve, I'm sorry that I wrote that continually reposting could get you banned. Please believe that I would never ban you: it would be an abuse of my "rights" as a Developer and Sysop. Only Jimbo is allowed to ban signed-in contributors, and I often argue against such bans.

However, as Anthere suggested, I tried to think about how I would feel if the shoe was on the other foot. And what I wrote about banning seemed -- at best -- heavy-handed, and -- at worst -- well, kind of scary.

So, as penance I'm taking an indefinite period of time off from Wikipedia. -- Uncle Ed 21:56 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

I dunno what to say... Apology accepted, Ed.Steverapaport 16:23 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Misc bits

bonjour Steve :-)

Please keep Wikipedia-specific links out of articles. Readers don't care and this reduces the transportability of our text to third parties (since they would probably not want links to a Wikipedia WikiProject they will have to manually remove these links). Talk pages are where contributors hang out so that is a much better place to have this type of meta information. BTW, if there is a particular organization of topic that you like on the WikiProject page then just copy that into a relevant article (such as ecoregion) and then link to that article. --mav 23:00 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Steve, read my major update to the article on Kitsch. Some of my writing is a bit strained, so maybe, if possible you can loosen the grammar. Brianshapiro Dec 3, 2003

I read it, I love it! Outstanding work, Brian. I wish I were a more relaxed writer myself.

Steverapaport 21:40, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

[edit] melodic accent

Not being extremely knowledgable about linguistics, I might now make a fool of myself, when I wonder if it's you or the English language that has confused melodic accent (a.k.a. pitch accent) with words stressed on more than one syllable (that occur, more or less, in most languages with long words). Your example hungrig appears to be misleading. Melodic accent on that word indicates the difference question–statement, either in a full sentence where word order conveys the same information, or more critical when the word constitutes a sentence of its own. Regards! --Johan Magnus 18:07, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hello Johan!

You've asked a lot of questions here, and you seem anything but ignorant on the topic, so I'll try to separate what I know from what I'm unsure of, then maybe we can work out what I did that was wrong.

Melodic accent and pitch accent appear (from previous Wiki entries, not mine) to be quite different. Melodic accent seems to refer specifically to stress accent in the Scandinavian/North Germanic style, whereas pitch accent looks like the well-known Chinese habit of distinguishing syllables by rising, falling, or level pitch.

Words stressed on more than one syllable appear, as you say, in all languages, but it's less usual for them to have more than one syllable CONSECUTIVELY stressed. That's why I'm trying to help people come to terms with it. If I've incorrectly used the term "Melodic accent" for this phenomenon, I blame the previous Wiki authors, but will happily correct this. I originally called it simply "emphasis" but couldn't find any good links for that.

Your third sentence is probably very well-informed, since you're a native speaker (and I'm not), but I'm afraid I don't understand it yet. Could you clarify?

Hungrig may well be a poor example of the two-syllable accent in Swedish -- would you like to suggest a better one? I'm especially looking for two words that have different meanings, and are distinguished only by one having the two-syllable accent.

Best regards,

Steverapaport 19:21, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Twenty years ago, I had to take some basic university courses in linguistics (requested for studies in another field). That's enough for me to know the limits of my knowledge. :-))

I suspect the main point here is that vocal stress and melodic accent are different pheonomenas, although they are connected to eachother in Norwegian and (Scandinavian) Swedish (i.e. not in Finland-Swedish). The example wet suit/wetsuit illustrates, as far as I understand, vocal stress but not melodic accent. Americans may be more used to the term sing-song intonation for a trait that often follows us when we take up foreign languages, and use our native intonation coupled to the host-language's stress pattern in the way we are used to. Similarly, Scandinavians spot dialects and foreign accents by the different melodic accents, or the lack thereof.

Remembering how in Scandinavian, as in English, questions are expressed by a rising pitch,[1] and statements by the lack thereof,[2] maybe one combination of vocal stress and melodic accent (however, not identical to the melodic accent of any Scandinavian dialect I know of) could be illustrated by

A wet suit? — rising pitch
A wetsuit! — descending pitch

Similar examples in Swedish (where, however the changed vocal stress is accompanied by a changed melodic accent) could be:

lama djur–lamadjur [3]
dagens nyheter–"Dagens Nyheter." [4] (the latter being a proper name)
kassa apparater–kassaapparater
mellan målen–mellanmålen
blå klocka–blåklocka

It's striking, how native Scandinavians according to linguistic research rely much more on pitch (i.e. melodic accent) than on vocal stress to distinguish between words that would otherways be undistinguished (i.e. would require context and hence longer sentences to be understood).

You are surely perfectly correct with respect to the peculiarity that consecutive syllables can be (differently) stressed, and this peculiarity is illustrated by hungrig. A akin example might be:

storman–stormansdräkt [5]

What I would call the utilization of melodic accent to express differences depending on the roots of words is explained at http://www.webgraph.se/bosse.thoren/prosodi_eng.html — however, I do not agree with the author of that page when he states that there be no difference in vocal stress. That page also lacks comparisons between the different melodic accents typical for the language's high status varieties.

Best regards! --Johan Magnus 18:46, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Great work

I just want to say that you've been doing great work un-LPOVing articles like Grammatical tense, Copula, and Inflection. I'm glad to have found more people concerned with countering the systemic bias of Wikipedia in the area of Linguistics. Keep up the good work! — mark ✎ 13:47, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the appreciation, Mark! It means a lot to me, especially coming from you. By the way I'm writing a tutorial on grammar for programming geeks. I'm putting it for now in journal form:

Human Grammar for Programmers, Parts 1-4 Since it's intended to be mostly NPOV from a language point of view, I'd really appreciate your feedback on it.

The general idea is that there are many brilliant IT people out there who can parse C and Java but not their own spoken language. Some would like to learn other languages but are scared off by all the grammar rules. I figure if I can show that what human languages have in common looks a lot like a programming language, I can help them out.

Ohhhh, a living steve ! bisous :-) SweetLittleFluffyThing

Nod. You were always greatly better than I on NPOV ;-) Look, some picts [6], [7], [8] and [9].

How's life Steve ? I was mostly offline for a full month, as I moved and my internet (and phone) company just made fun of me. Now, I have a big house, already quite messy ;-) --ant

Hi Ant! This one's my favorite!

[10]

How's the house?

Hiya ! I just came back from my holidays in the hoggar mountains, life with a group of tuaregs for 2 weeks. Amazing it was ! I have plentiful of great pictures and memories, some I will not be able to share with people here, as they just can't be (like pictures of inside of house, which I was asked not to display, or faces of women, which are normally veiled, or stories of hammam ;-)) but I have many others left. It is very strange to go back to this life after such an experience... I was able to have a nice 31 evening, while the night before was pretty tough, at 2300 meters, below 0, lot's of wind and as I was told afterwards, encountering with a scorpion (which I know now are not sleeping in such weather conditions as I was previously been told....). SweetLittleFluffyThing 20:31, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Your tutorial

Hi Steve, sorry for getting back to you this late. Had to find time to read and to answer. Your tutorial is a nice read — I really enjoy your style!

Well, the first thing I thought was that I'm rather skeptical towards attempts to formalize natural language (however, I understand that you’re not strictly attempting to do that — so the following digression may not be very relevant...). In my opinion, Chomskyan linguistics, however important and influential it has been (and still is), went off track precisely when it (silently) started propagating the position that some cognitive processes (like language processing) can be adequately captured by formalizing (or mathematicizing) them. I'm attracted to cognitive linguistics because it relates language to (or grounds it on) human experience and embodiment, factors previously largely overlooked.

On the other hand, there surely are parallels to be drawn between formal systems and some features of natural language. So your initiative, aimed at programmers, makes sense from their point of view on constructed languages — which is why they no doubt will like it. And I must say that you’re doing very well in not avoiding difficult cases like noun declensions and the like.

Relating LPOV/NPOV to your tutorial is tricky. For one thing, you’re certainly not English-centered and you are very aware of that, which is good. However, using Indo-European languages as the main languages for your examples (while being an obvious choice as they are familiar to most readers) inevitably makes your work susceptible to LPOV.

As an example of a missing thing due to LPOV I could take the (nice) part about adverbial phrases. It is very right to peel off the English syntactical terminology. However, the next question of course is how to be sure that the level of adverbial phrase is the deepest level — and I have the feeling that this is where your Indo-European background shines through most.

The problem is that in a lot of languages, the category of ‘adverbial phrase’ is not very clear-cut at all. Some languages conflate verbs with manner, so that you will find verbs expressing the equivalent of an English verb + adverbial phrase. In others, the word ‘phrase’ would not be very appropriate, either because they might express ‘adverbial concepts’ by some affix (not a phrase) or because they might express it by using an ideophone (not a phrase either). And this is only a start. Many traditional syntactical notions and categories suffer from similar confusions cross-linguistically, which is at least partly due to the fact that most of this terms originated in Indo-European linguistics. (Random reading tips: You might like Lexicalization Patterns, chapter 1 of Vol II of Talmy's Toward a Cognitive Semantics. You also might like works of Anna Wierzbicka.)

So is it LPOV? Yes, a little. Is it wrong or bad? I wouldn't say so. I think you are doing a superb job explaining many interesting features of language in a very illuminating way.

I'm off now. Hope you don’t mind the verbosity! I'd be curious to know your thoughts! — mark ✎ 23:39, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi Mark! Thanks so much for the illuminating review and I will follow the references. I'm not entirely surprised to find that I've missed a few opportunities to eliminate bias, but none of the things you mentioned would, when I countered the bias, really change my programmer's reconstruction of language much, which I'm glad to hear. (I will of course put in some notes based on your comments though!)

You've actually answered my questions more thoroughly than you might imagine, since I hadn't actually written them down or asked them clearly. In retrospect, they were:

Is this work too LPOV to be useful? (You've said no, though has room for improvemt)

Is this work nonsense from a linguistics point of view? (You seem to be saying no)

Is this work a repeat of something well-known by linguists? (You didn't mention anything)

Is the objective clear and the writing style readable? (You've said yes to both)

With all this in mind, I'll give it some nicer formatting, clearer explanations, and wider distribution, and maybe consider publishing someday if it gets big enough! Thanks very much!

[edit] Dorso-palatal velar fricative

Hi, Steve, sorry to bother you, and I really am ignorant of linguistics, as opposed to some people on this page who pretend to be ;-), but I am a native Swedish speaker, and I'm baffled by that unusual voiceless dorso-palatal/velar fricative consonant pronounced somewhere between "sh" and "hw". (Even after I finally got Mozilla to display the phonetic character.) I don't at all mean to say that you describe it wrong, but, uh, well, what? Could you maybe tell me a word it occurs in?--Bishonen | Talk 00:53, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi Bishonen! How about in "sju sjösjuka sjömen"? Of course the sound is not pronounced the same in all parts of Sweden but it's always as far as I know somewhere between "sh" and "hw". Steverapaport 00:58, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sj? Oooooohhhhhhh (howling like a wolf in comprehension). Thanks!--Bishonen | Talk 01:08, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks to you for pointing out that it wasn't mentioned on the page! I've corrected that. Best, steve. Steverapaport 01:16, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I plan to comment on this on the reference desk page - given that the Wikipedia site and/or my computer doesn't obstruct it. I've already touched it at User:Ruhrjung#Anti-Scandinavian bias, where my frustration might shine through. --Ruhrjung 13:38, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)

[edit] boats and halls

Do you have any particular reasons for preferring the diphthong as an aproximation to the Scandinavian å-sound? Regards! /Tuomas 18:59, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

(This was about my replacing hall with boat in the pronunciation guide for the Scandinavian å sound.) Tuomas, apologies for my North American bias. You must not have listened much to American English speech -- Boat has two vowels in written English but it's not a dipthong in most pronunciations, unless you want to make the case that it's [@U], (as it may well be in RP, and everything's a diphthong in RP, more or less). "Hall" on the other hand is pronounced with an /A/, not an /O/. It has different regional pronunciations but only in unusual dialects would it sound like /O/. If it were, it would sound way too much like "hole", and so that vowel would have to shift somewhere else.

To my mind, though, the possible diphthong nature of "boat" is nicely balanced by its mnemonic spelling. Not to mention that I often hear Å pronounced in Sweden as a diphthong itself -- the long version as in "så" is often pronounced [OA]. Anyway I'm open to better examples, but "hall" simply isn't right.

Shall we agree first on what sound "Å" has, and what SAMPA you believe it to be? Then we can perhaps find an English word that we agree on. Regards, Steverapaport 19:26, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your responses! I'm currently preparing for exams (in Arabic), and will not be present here at Wikipedia regularly. Furthermore, my relation to Swedish is not uncomplicated. I went to Swedish kindergarten for a year a so, a very long time ago - almost before I'd learned to speak - but my mothertounge is Finnish. However, this early experience of being surrounded by Swedish has given me a strange sort of near-native relation to the language. I'm not as aware of peculiarities as are people who have studied it from scratch. I've however been much involved in the reception of exchange students to the Lund University, and by them I've come to get some impressions of what's important (and not!) for adult students of Swedish.

But, as with all vowels of Swedish it's crucial to remember that the quality differ between so called "long" and "short" vowels — it's not at all only a difference of length, as it is in for instance Finnish. :-))

The 'å' sound of "stå", "fågel" is qualitatively different from that of "hålla", "pojke". The first is according to my understanding X-SAMPA /o/, IPA:

, the second is X-SAMPA /O/, IPA:

. International Phonetic Alphabet for English proposes caught for the second sound. And my Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English proposes /h

:ll/ for "hall" and /s

:/ for "saw".

/Tuomas 00:18, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ok so we're into differences in English dialect here. See Even IPA is pronounced differently across the Atlantic?! Simple to solve. The short one is "hall" according to Oxford, but is "cause" in American English according to [11]. By the way, this same source lists the "boat" as the example for the nearest American vowel to the /o/, the long 'å'. (Actually I made it up, but nice to see it confirmed somewhere) I think we can settle it nicely by just being explicit, something like:

The long 'å' as in "stå" is pronounced /o/ as in "boring", the short 'å' as in "hålla is pronounced /O/ as in the British "hall" or the American "home".

Further corrections? --steve

Looks fine now! /Tuomas 05:44, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Translation

As you might see part of the job on Vala's thesis has already been bone, but I haven't checked it. For the remaining part we can maybe work togheter, I think the biggest problem is the correct translation of terms that are specific of the jargon used in sociology studies, of which i have little knowledge. I'm more skilled in translating fron english to italian than from italian to english, so my translations will eventually need some serious proofreading by someone that writes in english better than me.

Snowdog 01:37, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I suspected you might need an English native to proofread and improve. In general translations work best when you're translating into your own native language. I'm also happy to look at the originals, posso leggere italiano. Can you show me where Vala's thesis is? I haven't seen it. Steverapaport 12:08, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cornelis Vreeswijk

Hey (hej), Steve, thanks very much for your cool addition to the very first article I wrote here (I think there may have been an original stub)! I sure don't see a lot of those.--Bishonen | Talk 00:31, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Glad you liked it, Bishonen! Coincidentally Allan Sherman was my first entire article, so it's good to see them linked. I hope you followed the link to my new page Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh too, it has links to the lyrics in English and Swedish (and Esperanto!). By the way the sv.wikipedia has a much shorter article on Vreeswijk which really needs extra stuff, and at the very least a mention of this song's history and a link to Allan Sherman. If you can write in Swedish (I don't trust mine) why not give it a try? I've added some external links there already. Steverapaport 09:21, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I missed clicking on your links (there's too much effing blue on wikipedia, I've pretty much given up clicking on links in articles :-(), but now I've seen your articles, they're extremely cool. The state of "Cornelis" on sv:wiki has been on my guiltlist since forever. :-( I've got an account there, and a subpage intended for a translation of "CV" on, even. It's just that, well, there's always something more interesting (=something on en:wiki) to do.
There's a very funny and also ~~eye~~ ear-opening column in Dagens Nyheter today by an immigrant who's lived here for 35 years and still worries about the long/short vowel horror (Hor morr dy? :-)) and the accent trauma (tómten—tómtèn). "Det är inte sje-ljuden utan vokalchocken som lämnar många oläkta sår långt upp i integrationsåldern." It showed me for the first time a glimpse of what the problem might be. (Being a native speaker in good standing, as I am, gets in the way of appreciating that there could ever be a problem.) Unfortunately it's not available on dn.se, but it's in the paper paper today, , in case you've got access to it, section Kultur, p. 5, Jarema Bielawski. You too, Ruhrjung! I'm hoping you're watching this page, I'm desperately rushed, no time to post to R. separately. Best, Bishonen | Talk 15:28, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Got the paper, hilarious and describes my problems well. Thanks! Steve

[edit] Image:Sphynx with down on feet.JPEG

As part of the Untagged Images effort to categorize all images as free/unfree etc., can you please tag Image:Sphynx with down on feet.JPEG with its appropriate license? {{GFDL}} is the generic license. Thanks. 119 06:27, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Done, no problem Steverapaport 13:16, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Corporatism

Steve, just a heads up: Cberlet (Chip Berlet), who questions your "corporatism" quote in the Fascism article is someone whose work I've known for about 20 years, and he generally knows his stuff very well. I'm not absolutely saying he's right about this, but I will be surprised if something isn't fishy (e.g. your source misattributes the quotation, something like that). I strongly recommend that you assume completely good faith on his side, and just work on sorting it out. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:55, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I have always been a little doubtful about the authenticity myself, since I couldn't find a copy of the 1932 Italiana. If Chip found one, he rules. Steverapaport 20:57, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Hello Muddah and housekeeping

Thanks for the note--yes, I think the song well deserves its own article (and it makes a really clever commercial). Thanks also for the kind words. And, as I much prefer a variety of 'housekeeping' tasks over writing, I appreciate all of you that add content. Niteowlneils 03:26, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Schwa cleanup

I've moved the discussion to Talk:Schwa so that others can participate. Hopefully another viewpoint will clear up the confusions we're having. Nohat 01:51, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of Highlights

I read on the Johnny Carson page about the "journalistic tradition to remove the highlights in the eyes of the photo when a person is dead". I was interested in that. Wondering if you could explain that to me, or show an example. Thanks. M@$+@ Ju 20:35, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I see that you read this on the Johnny Carson talk page. Sorry to be redundant, I should have checked first. However, if you find anything more, I'd be interested.

I am unable to confirm this with any journalist friends, but then I don't know anyone in newspapers. I'll keep trying. Steverapaport 11:35, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sorry for the revert of Japanese Language

Hi Steverapaport,

I checked the history of Japanese_language. You saved your version on Feb 5 16:58, and I saved mine on Feb 5 17:01. At that time I was removing quite a number of interwiki links to the Toki Pona wikipedia which was closed in November. I loaded several articles each into a browser window, edited the interwiki links and then saved them, one by one. I did not notice that there was a save conflict and I thought that the wiki software would make sure that such things do not happen. I assume I was wrong. Sorry for overriding your edit, it was not intentional.

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann 22:43, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Permafrost Wikimeet

I'm very sorry, Steve, I've been racking my brains, but that obviously wasn't a good place to look. :-( I got nothing. Bishonen | Talk 22:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish on the move

Hey, there Steve. I've worked a lot on Swedish language lately, and I've requested a Peer review as well. I would be very happy if you could help out in making the article ready for a future FAC-nomination. I think it could be very helpful to have a non-native speaker with some in-depth knowledge of the subject; it's easy to forget to state the obvious when describing one's native language no matter how solid the source material is.

Peter Isotalo 12:03, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] style

Referring to Contractions [12]

"In general, we prefer formal writing. Therefore, avoid contractions — such as don't, can't and won't, except when you are quoting directly."

hence the correction of can't to cannot

[edit] User categorisation

You were listed on the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Italy page as living in or being associated with Italy. As part of the Wikipedia:User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Italy for instructions. --Army1987 21:10, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

You were listed on the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Ontario page as living in or being associated with Ontario. As part of the Wikipedia:User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Ontario for instructions.--Rmky87 04:43, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sicilian Cart Photos

Thanks for your great photos of the Sicilian carts! Grazie Mille! - AKeen 21:21, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Jewish culture

Hi Steverapaport, I was wondering whether you were interested in joining and developing a new WikiProject. While the more-established WikiProject Judaism focuses on relgious aspects of Judaism, this project intends to look at Jewish literature, music, theater, language and history, among other aspects of culture. If you are interested in helping to edit and review these articles, please join! jnothman ^talk 06:06, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Italian pronunciation

Hi, I'm a native Italian. I've tried to answer some of your questions in the Italian Language discussion page. If I can help you further just ask me. Happy Christmas. --Wikipedius 15:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikimedia Canada

Hi there! I'd like to invite you to explore Wikimedia Canada, and create a list of people interested in forming a local chapter for our nation. A local chapter will help promote and improve the organization, within our great nation. We'd also like to encourage everyone to suggest projects for our national chapter to participate in. Hope to see you there!--DarkEvil 17:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AFD nomination for Failure

I noticed that you were having trouble with the headers for the AFD nomination for Failure. I've fixed it. For your information, the header issue occurred because you missed step #2. (See:WP:AFD#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion]]). Simplified instructions:

Place {{subst:afd}} at the very top of the page you are nominating for deletion. (In this case, you put it below the wikitionary tag.)
Next, click on this article's entry link that appears after the afd template is rendered. It will be red initially as the page has not yet been started.
Here is what you omitted: Add {{subst:afd2|pg=Failure|text=}} to the top of the page. This string of text will be in small font at the bottom of the afd message on the article page. After the "text=", place an explanation of why you are nominating the article. Under the template, you can add a "vote".
Add the deletion subpage to the log: Click on the log link at the bottom of the article's afd message and paste {{subst:afd3|pg=Failure}} ~~~~ at the bottom of that page.

It seems that you completed all the steps correctly, with the exception of #2. Hope this helps. Thanks for your contributions. — ERcheck (talk) 13:58, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Erdos

You noted that Euler was the most prolific mathematician, more prolific than Erdos. Do you have a source for this? I could't find anywhere the assertion on the Erdos page that Euler has more pages but Erdos has more papers (and I would imagine counting all the papers from both men would be an extremely unpleasant experience :P )Borisblue 15:06, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Erdos says:

Erdős was one of the most prolific publishers of papers in mathematical history, second only to Leonhard Euler (Erdős published more papers, while Euler published more pages).[citation needed] He wrote around 1,500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly with co-authors. He had about 500 different collaborators, and strongly believed in (and obviously practiced) mathematics as a social activity.

Since that "second only to" has been around at least since May when I first proposed declaring Euler first, I figured nobody would object. Of course you could instead repeat the information above and declare it a virtual tie. --Steve Rapaport 00:11, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Guinness World Records says: Most prolific mathematicians: "The prolific output of Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler (1707-83) was such that his papers were still being published for the first time more than 50 years after his death. His collected works have been printed bit by bit since 1910 and will eventually occupy more than 75 large quarto volumes." http://www.4to40.com/recordbook/index.asp?category=&counter=445

We can continue the discussion and sourcing on the talk page

[edit] Re: Talk:Chinese fire drill

For David di Paoli, and for the record, I'm both Jewish and Canadian, and I give the community permission to add in one more derogatory expression for each of these affiliations, if it helps balance things. :-) --Steve Rapaport

I present exhibit 1! http://greyfire.org/picture_library/communazi.gif (NB: do not click if easily offended) --Grey Knight ⊖ 20:00, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

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