User talk:Tom Peters

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[edit] Older stuff

Tom, the twelve days of Christmas are from December 26th through January 6th. The associated evenings of those days (of course) start the evening before, so that the eve of the first day is the 25th. Christmas is not one of the 12 days of Christmas. Epiphany, the 12th day is January 6. Some people mistakenly think that Christmas day is the first, but it is not. Any dictionary clarifies this. The twelve days are the days AFTER Christmas. User:Chad A. Woodburn

Hi Tom. Looking at your user page, you obviously know your way around, but greetings anyway. jimfbleak 07:14 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi Tom. Just to say that you've made nice additions and corrections to the Kidinnu article. I have two short questions regarding it, if you please:

  1. I am still confused in writing B.C. instead of wiki style BC. Should I continue to write in a form [[402 BC|402 B.C.]] or not? What is your opinion since you like time calculations... I've seen that someone changed just to wiki form BC.
  2. It would be fine to show somewhere how to calculate from a sexagesimal time calculations (for instance 29d 31:50:8:20 to 29d + 12h + 793/1080h or to 29d 12h 44 m (3.33...s) form).

As for Hipparchos. Is it a good manner to change all existent Latinized names to their original ones? (Herodotus, Eudoxus, Philolaus, Iamblichus, Monoimus (original is Arab), Hippolytus, ...). It is strange for me as a foreign-born that it can't be definitely distinguished what form of a certain name should be used in English. If this help, my native language generally cuts Greek termination "-os" and by-passes Latinization. In this manner it might be in English: Hipparch, Horodot, Eudox, Philolas, Iamblich, Hippolyt, but English is not what we think it is. On the other side it is OK for Meton, Anaximander and such. You should also correct back all wrong external links there at Hipparchos. I also hope that the article of Hipparchos will be as good and acceptable for all as Kidinnu's is. And also about Cyprus regarding your changes at Aratus. How this island was called in Greek time? Was it named also Cilicia (or similar, Cyprus probably not -- I guess Cypros, he, he.) as in Roman times? I assumed this, but you say it is irrelevant. Best regards. --XJamRastafire 07:53 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanations. Interesting about 1/1080d aka "halakiem".

  • BC|B.C.: I'll use from now on just wiki style BC, since it is easier. And also my native keyboard does not have keys for "[", "]" and "|", so I have to push ALT+(0)91, ALT+(0)93 and ALT+124 so many times...
  • Why do you think that English forms of Greek names without suffixes are worse than original names? They sound fine for me. It is interesting which names changed from their original Greek names to Latinized forms or forms without suffixes... Probably of persons which were the most known in Middle Ages.
  • I agree about Hipparchos, since I've already decided to redirect.
  • If you're sure for Cyprus so let it stays in this way without possible other ancient name.
  • I guess it was already Nabu-rimanni, who found that estimation of synodic month (29d 12h 44m ~5s) and an error less than 1s. This error is probably not correct. I haven't checked it. And as I have written in my notes (sourcess are lost right now) that Hipparchus corrected the error to 23/50s. Perhaps Kidinnu as a young man again measured this value without any improvements. I've rounded Nabu-rimanni's value to 1/100 of seconds according to Starbo's note, so you're right about these two mentioned values, which are in fact the same. One at Kidinnu is rounded to 1s (29.53061343...d; 29.530614d was not mentioned to be raunded to 6th decimal with accuracy of 9/100s) and the other at Nabu-rimanni to 1/100s (29.53061401...d). The problem is also an accuracy of their measurements, so it is rather hard for us where to round all these values and how to show them. I really do not know if they were able to measure within 1/100s. I vote to give the same values with the same accuracy (let us say to 1s or similar). I must also say that I did not have sexagesimal values that you brought up. It is most likely, yes, that Chaldeans calculated time as angles, therefore in sexagesimal system. It is strange that Ptolemy still used calculations based on sexagesimal. I am not sure for Hipparchus. Many sources allege that he was the first who devided circle to 360° and I hardly believe this. This he must have fetched from Babylonia. But if your value of his estimation of tropical year is correct (365d + 1/4 - 1/300), he indeed still calculated in sexagesimal. And perhaps not since this value is in a decimal system.
  • 23/50s: What you don't understand? Which value Hipparchus in fact measured around 139 BC? I have no data for this. I just noticed according to all my available sources that he improved Kidinnu's value bellow 0.5s. This might in fact be true, if earlier values are valid.
  • Do you have any suggestions how to give these unfortunate values: as in this example of Nabu-rimanni and/or Kidinnu's value of synodic month (error < 1s, positive or negative?):
- 29d 12h 44m 10/3s
- 29.53059414...d
- 29d + 12h + 793/1080h | 29d + 1/2 + 793/25920
- [29;31:50:80:20]60
...

I propose the first one all over together with exceptions (like here with the last one). So if one measures 365d+1/4, we write 365d 6h (and leave 0m 0s). Best regards. --XJamRastafire 13:33 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)


Thank you Tom again for your explanations. Now everything is much clearer. As my web explorer froze I have to write this again.

  • ...not before Hipparchus.... As you've correctly noticed this was meant to mean that Hipparchus found the value with an error of 23/50s. I presumambly just expressed badly in English since you, as a native speaker, did not understand. Yes it would be fine if we would know about a second as an unit in those early days of our knowledge of the skies. I have to programme some more functions to check if 23/50s is [0;0:0:1:19]. You probably have some already. I also have to check if this Strabo's quotation is correct. Probably is, since I am not contriving what I write in my TeX notes over the years. And I am glad that someone like you can help me to understand further on what was going on in astronomy in the dawn of human civilization.
  • As I've written that I did not have sexagesimal values and I've put in what I had. I understand quite well the representing of these unfortunate values and scales to use beside them. If we observe past events some 2000 years ago within seconds then calculations are not so simple any more. You probably also know for Mayan Tzol'kin which uses a modified vigesimal number system. I am also interested in correlations of the Mayan knowledge and Chaldean and Greek knowledge about the motion of the Earth and related apparent motions. We have just a partial insight of this, since many Mayan inscriptions we are still discovering and so many Greek works before 1000s were lost.
  • If you have any extra time can you please check my pensil sketch how Hipparchus might look here. (If the link does not work I can sent it via the E-mail ...) This is approx. the fifth or sixth version. Any comments are wellcome. When I'll finished it in colours I'll post it in wikipedia.

Best regards. --XJamRastafire 22:21 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I just wanted to drop in and mention that I think you're doing a fantastic job on the Hipparchus article; thank you! - Hephaestos 00:03, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just so you know Wikipedia is not a place to post original research. Fumocy for example, appears to be just that. It was listed on our Articles for deletion page for over a week, but instead of deleting I moved into your user space. --mav 09:59, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hello. Please note: you do not need to capitalize the first letter of a link. The first letter (unlike the other letters) is case-insensitive. (This remark is inspired by your editing of Apollonius of Perga. Michael Hardy 14:28, 19 Aug 2003 (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 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)

[edit] Arctic Circle

Hello Tom,

Have a look at Arctic Circle. What do you make of the statement "Due to precession, the Arctic Circle fluctuates within a band of 250 kilometres, moving by about half a kilometre in one year." If any effect caused this it would surely be Nutation, and by nowhere near this amount. I think the statement is rubbish - what do you think? Arcturus 20:04, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

This is mostly incorrect. Precession is the motion of the intersection of the equator and the ecliptic, and is the result of the motion of both planes. The location of the (ant)arctic circles is determined by the inclination of the polar rotation axis (or, similarly, the equator) on the ecliptic. Precession of the polar axis can occur without any change in this inclination. However, the inclination is changing and that introduces a component into the overall precession motion; its period is 40000 years or so and its amplitude of the order of 1 degree. Finally, the ecliptic plane itself is tilting (if only at a rate 1% of the precession of the polar axis) and that contributes to both the precession rate and to the inclination, so the location of the arctic circles are moving a little bit. Not so drastic as the article says. Finally, nutation does change the inclination of the polar axis on the ecliptic in a complex cycle with a main period of 18.6 years, and an amplitude of about 9" or +/- 280m on the Earth's surface. So the excursions are not as drastic as the article states. I will revise it. Tom Peters

[edit] Coligny Calendar

Hello Tom, I see you removed 62/5 (12.4) and the reference to Coligny Calendar from Month despite the fact that it has, in fact been used in a historical lunisolar calendar. Before I revert your deletion, I'm just dropping by to ask if you had some reason to do so. --Nantonos 11:11, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

That particular section is in fact entitled Calendrical implications and the second half of it starts More importantly, in lunisolar calendars, an integral number of synodic months is fitted into some integral number of years. . The example I gave is indeed a lunisolar calendar and does indeed have an integral number of synodic months (62) in an integral number of years (5). The introduction of continued fractions in that context seems spurious; feel free to add examples to the continued fractions page. Meanwhile, since the article is actually about months, in calendars, I plan to remove the 'continued fractions' reference and talk about approximations that were actually used in calendars.
If you have some evidence for any published work that argues a case for a different number of months or years, please cite it. --Nantonos 11:52, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Calvin and Hobbes Day

Hi Tom! I'm not the user who originally added Calvin and Hobbes Day to November 18, nor do I know who did it, but anyway, I just wanted to wish you a happy Calvin and Hobbes Day! Have a great day, and be sure to raise a mug of Spicy Spaceman Spiff Sprite to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that famous duo! --wacko2 17:50, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Book of Hours

Thanks for your edits Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I see you've been making a number of edits in relation to various Books of Hours. Nice work. -- Solipsist 11:04, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks on Hipparchus

Thanks for the feedback on the Hipparchus article -- I agree, it certainly needs a lot of work. I intend to incorporate the rest of the "Distance, parallax, size of the Moon and Sun" section into my own article, and then pare down this section of the main "Hipparchus" article. This is what needs to be done for each section of the article, but it'll be a pretty big undertaking. I'd be interested in reading more of the original/secondary sources and doing some of this work, but help is always great. Are you interested in working on Hipparchus again?

Also, do you know of any good tools for drawing the kind of diagrams I have on the Hipparchus On Sizes and Distances and Aristarchus On the Sizes and Distances pages? They're pretty excruciating to do with Mathematica. --Dantheox 20:55, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Re: proclamation day

No idea, sorry. My edits to Proclamation Day were Western Australia-oriented. I wouldn't have a clue about the South Australian angle. I suggest you ask Cyberjunkie or Scott Davis. Snottygobble | Talk 06:08, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

As is stated in the article, Proclamation Day is celebrated on December 26 although December 28 was the actual date the Province of South Australia was proclaimed. It's not unsual to have public holidays commemorating certain events on days different to their actual dates in Australia, usually to ensure long weekends or keep successive holidays in blocks. December 28 is probably still remembered, but the public holiday and festivities occur on what is elsewhere Boxing Day.--cj | talk 16:17, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Full moon cycle

Tom, all the confusing parts have been moved to the talk page. I'm sorry, but after trying for upwards of two and a half hours, I could not understand how your algorithm worked. You use terms such as 'accumulator', 'offset', and 'correction' without thoroughly defining them; the system is not clear to people unversed in calendrical algorithms.

For instance:

"The first three terms for the computation of true phase from mean phase are (from Meeus 1991):

New Moon Full Moon Argument  
−0.40720 −0.40614 M' mean anomaly of Moon
+0.01608 +0.01614 2×M'
+0.17241 +0.17302 M mean anomaly of Sun

Amplitudes in days; take the sine of the arguments."

Now just what does that mean? Argument of what? The sine function? What are M and M', and what is the difference? I presume the columns "New Moon" and Full Moon" are numbers to be multiplied by the result of the sine calculation, but you do not state this. The entire section implies familiarity with the subject, something you cannot assume in an encyclopedia article. I'd love to know exactly what you're doing here, but I can't do so with the article text as is. Please go through your text and assume your reader is dumb as a rock (I'm not, but I don't have all of the context to figure things out, so I might as well be). Explain everything thoroughly. Then it should be fine.Alba 22:31, 18 April 2006 (UTC)


OK, the first two sections seem pretty clear now. Once you start talking about specific settings to set the accumulator for specific epochs it gets confusing. You discuss multiple ways to run the accumulator and multiple epochs to use. A table probably would help. Alba 02:09, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tides

Hello Tom, just following on from the edits on the tidal acceleration article. I hope you know what you're doing with the explanation there better than me (From you user page, your field appears to be chemistry, while mine is quantum mechanics. An astronomer would be useful, perhaps! ;-) ).

Anyway, I wanted to ask you to have a look at the related tidal locking article if you have some time. I've been over there editing another explanation that didn't appear to hang together, but an informed check would be good in case I've made a mess of it. Deuar 14:03, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History of astronomy articles

Finell, I am pleased to see your recent enthusiast contributions to astronomical history articles. One request: could you be less aggressive in editing, and try keep the number of edit sessions limited? I now see >10 changes a day in one article, it is hard to keep up reviewing them. Tom Peters 13:48, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Dear Tom:
You're welcome. There is a lot of good, interesting content in these articles (much of which is thanks to you), which is what attractied me to them in the first place. I thought that they could be made even better by conforming them to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, with some copy editing, and adding more source documentation.
As far as the number of edit sessions, I've been told that making several smaller edits to an article in separate sessions (documenting each of them) makes the edits easier to follow than making several edits in a single pass. Anyone who wants to follow the edits can see them individually (or in small, manageable goups) by paging through the edit History. If you prefer to see all edits at once, on the History page you can simply click on the cur link to left the version that precedes the group of edits that you want to examine, to compare the current version with the older one. So way I learned to do it gives other editors their choice of how to review edits.
I do apologize for what appears to be heavyhandedness. It is a carryover from my days as editor of a professional academic journal, which required rigid compliance with style manuals and such. However, I do not expect to be doing any significant further editing to these articles, with one exception: The existing Chaldean links were to a disambiguation page. Wikipedia requests that links to a disambiguation page be revised to point to the intended target article (see the box at the bottom of Chaldean). In these articles, I believe that the target should be History of astronomy#Mesopotamia, written as [[History of astronomy#Mesopotamia|Chaldean]]. I made this change in Naburimannu, but not in the other articles; if you beat me to it, I would NOT complain! —Finell (Talk) 18:48, 22 August 2006 (UTC)


Tom: Thanks very much for updating me on the meaning of VAT. It was very thoughtful of you to share it with me. Finell (Talk) 23:36, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sicamber

Tom, thank you for changing the sali-link. Johanthon, 19 oktober 2006, 23:59hrs

[edit] Xtract from VPP

Saw on VP
Applied an edit you should know about. Note the removal of untimely second equation. Move that down to after you finish clarifying stuff. Best regards // FrankB 19:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
re: Thanx for the moral support, but now I am confused. Are we still talking about Full moon (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) cycle, and possibly New moon (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (on which you commented) here? What I have been describing in New moon is a solution for almost exactly this secondary-school-exam-type question:

"The distance between Forrest and Kalgoorlie in Southern Australia is 700 km. A car drives from F to K with a constant speed of 50 miles per hour. At the same time a pedestrian starts to walk from K to F at 1.5 meters per second. After how many minutes do they meet, and at what distance from K in km?".

Chapront provided expressions for the position of the car and the pedestrian as a function of time, and I worked that around to a formula to when they meet, every time they traveled around the world. It is somewhat more complicated because the expression is a polynomial, and I expect not many people can actually derive such an equation (which is why I did it and put it on a public spot): but it is not calculus and can easily be checked by people with just good arithmetical skills. Tom Peters 23:38, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Does DamnifIknow anwer your opening line query?

'Yes', to be serious. And NO, because until ready to 'this message' close out, never did I even see Full moon cycle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs), or the AFD on same. (Sorry. Too little time. I goofed. I STILL haven't given it a fair read, and I need to go eat and spend family time—eating at 10:15 is bad enough! At least you made it through AFD. The OR discussion will take a while, I'd think. This AFD needs linked on VPP, BTW.) But I'm not sure how I confused you (OK-Now maybe I am. this is a good edit BTW. Kudos. {{I2}In the final stage, don't the two techniques come out to the same predicted dates? (The one article really just cited the math in the other, which was part of my objection if you see my edit. Look for imbedded commented text in diff mode too! But that's a clarity editorial Englishy thingy, not the issue of OR/NOR)

I would have expected the original work to also be periodic of a form akin to an angular rate (Think Theta-dot) applied versus time to an initial datum (Theta0, so to take the analogy to the next step, given a shift to apply a new initial condition (a position in time later, Theta1) the derivative of the rate should look much like the derivative of the original, another position ... or so I would think. Yeah, I'm sure the elliptical nature of orbits and axial tilt, and few other factors are in there too, but the basic time periodicity should still be recognizable. (Since there's more to peruse, I'll reserve these guesses for now in closing.)

Aside from that expectation, I'd think your derivation, if polynomials, would be something many editors here (quite a few engineers, computer scientists, grad students, etc. with a good grounding in math advanced up to linear algebra and such just to get a BS degree) can slice and dice. So for my money, if the derivation is tacked in as a sub-page, and we can check the math, there is no big deal. If someone wants to cite your derivation page as hypothetically put forth by 'L', let him duke it out with the publisher in question. What harm can a periodic set of figures do? Will some almanac publish using Wikipedia or a tried and true creditable source? In sum, I see no liability issues. My email's open if you want to enable yours (unless you do, you can't send me via Wiki-email, but both my main user pages have an non-'@' version of mine if you care to kick it around more.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fabartus (talk • contribs) Revision as of 03:16, 22 December 2006 (UTC) // Oopsie-my bad! FrankB 16:22, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

  • FYI--See: 15:54, 23 December 2006 Talk:Full moon cycle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (→Summary and recommendations of deletion proposal - Answer to user Lunokhod -- AFAIK, It doesn't work that way--AFD is an up or down vote essentially) Cheers! // FrankB 16:27, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Better reference for lunar ephemerides?

Hi Tom - I just found a link to a book written by Meeus in 2002 called More Mathematical Astronomy Morsels. I don't have a copy of this, but based on the table of contents, it appears that all of the ephemerides might be updated here. It might be possible to use this source as a reference for the equations in lunar phase, new moon, full moon, and full moon cycle that otherwise might be considered original research by wikipedia policy. Lunokhod 11:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] draconic or Draconic

Moved to Talk:Eclipse cycle Tom Peters 13:00, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Divination

Dear Tom. I've reverted your edits at talk:Divination that got my previous entry mixed up. Please re-add your contribution as a separate post under the same heading, and I'll be happy to read it.--Niels Ø (noe) 19:14, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

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