User talk:GromXXVII

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Welcome!

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

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Mushroom (Talk) 20:40, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Re:

John Seigenthaler, Sr. was an orphan article that got Wikipedia a lot of bad press because basically no one had really looked at the article, until the subject of the article did. If there'd been an inbound link from say, John F. Kennedy, the incorrect claims would have probably just been up for a few hours, instead of a few months. If the reference is too confusing feel free to remove it from the bot's page. --W.marsh 03:59, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] UCF

Where did you get your information regarding UCF housing? I'm a UCF student who lives on the campus; when I re-registered for housing for this Fall and Spring, all of the forms clearly stated that the dorms were reserved for freshmen and the AV apartments were reserved for upperclassmen. The website also indicates so. I'm going to leave it with your changes, because I don't think that it actually matters and does not affect the quality of the article, but I just thought that I'd ask what your source of information was. M412k 05:09, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

From my experience with housing. I've lived in Apollo for three years and knew a freshmen living in an AV apartment. They reserve 15% of housing in general for upperclassmen; but where it is makes no difference, that is determined at contact signing.
For the most part they don't advertise that upperclassmen can live in Apollo or Libra: one has to go to housing themselves to request it (except for OSC hall in this past year). The AV apartments are the first units on campus to fill up because they're in highest demand: and for fall generally do so before many people have even gotten to turn in their contact, but occasionally when they have space available freshmen can live there.GromXXVII 13:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Watchlist

From your userpage :

I'd love to know how the watchlist works: It appears to only list about 1/10th of the modifications from any given day.

From what I understand about the watchlist, it only appears to list an article once in the list, so if a newer edit occurs to an article already in the list, it will be moved (rather than duplicated) to the head of the list which might explain the low change count. You can turn off listing of edits made by bots and/or your own edits which may also go some way to explaining it.

Additionally, thanks for your input into the God talk page regarding parody religions, but I don't think the debate will go anywhere unless another user joins in, Grace Note seems to want to settle the issue by insulting me (and briefly you), and is apparently renowned for ignoring other peoples point of view and resorting to insults when things arn't going his way (He's also been blocked before for such actions). FalconZero (Talk | contribs) 20:56, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Questionable edits from new users?

A quandary. Here and there you find edits that might be sincere, or a disguised act of vandalism, such as a recent edit on the UCF page with edit summary "grammer" that did nothing but add an out of date, lower than current ranking to the school in the page introduction.

So suspecting it was vandalism I naturally checked the users other contributions. There was another edit on the UF page that played with the wording and made the school sound lesser than it the previous wording.

There have been other cases where the [new or anonymous] user has had several other questionable edits. But what to do? If they’re obviously vandalism it’s easy, go and revert them all. If they’re not so obvious, though, as in this case, I wonder if there is a wikipedia policy? I figured I would Assume good faith that the editor was sincere and not go revert the other questionable edits.

Is there a policy that addresses this quandary? GromXXVII 00:47, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] improper integral

You changed the introductory sentence of improper integral to this:

In calculus the term improper integral is used to deal with integrals of functions that could possibly have infinite area, and thus not exist[...]

That makes no sense at all. The integral

\int_0^\infty \frac{dx}{1+x^2}

is often considered an improper integral (though it could be considered a Lebesgue integral instead, nonetheless in finding its value, one usually treats it as an improper integral, i.e., one finds the limit as the upper bound of integration approaches \scriptstyle\infty\,). Its value is \scriptstyle\pi/2.\, The integral

\int_0^1 1\,dx

is NOT an improper integral. Its value is 1.

What in the world could it mean to say that the first one above "could possibly have infinite area, and thus not exist" but that the second "could not possibly have infinite area"?? Neither of the two could possibly be infinite. What makes the first an improper integral is NOT that it "could possibly not exist", but rather that one treats it as a limit

\lim_{a\to\infty}\int_0^a \frac{dx}{1+x^2}.

Michael Hardy 16:27, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I was attempting to explain it without using too many advanced concepts. The latter integral cannot possibly have an infinite area because it is continuous and bounded on a bounded interval – so the integral must exist. The definition of the integral directly implies it must.
The former integrates over an unbounded region, and so without calculation or characterization theorems one cannot know if the integral converges or not.
The word “possibly” is probably not the best, I was thinking in terms of the difference between before it is known if an integral is convergent, and after it is known. GromXXVII 19:26, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citations

I don't agree with your assertion regarding the deletion of "truthful uncited material." My deletions are usually of controversial material that don't have a place in an article without a citation. If it's truthful, then a citation can be easily found. I have also added back info after finding a citation. On the other hand, I've noticed you insisting on keeping info in articles when it can't be backed up, which tends to tick people off and leads to edit wars. 74.249.12.248 16:11, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

That is what the {{fact}} can be used for: when something may need a citation, but you don’t have one at the moment. That allows you to come back to it, or alert others that it needs one (and readers that it is might be questionable). By removing the material: someone else that knows a citation or where to find it won’t even know it needs one! Depending on how common that information is, and how prominent the page is, it might be lost for even months or years in some cases.
If the material actually doesn’t belong on a page, the question of a citation is not an issue, because it shouldn’t be there in the first place even if it is true. I was referring to your deletions of material under the reasoning that it needed a citation – material that many times didn’t seem to be POV or hindering the article. If something is so controversial that it shouldn’t be in the article at all until it is cited, it would be better to move it to the talk page so that it’s not lost, and others can find a citation and/or fix it to a quality to put back in the article. (but at least it won’t be lost in the history)
I not quite sure what you’re talking about regarding me, but I assume you’re talking about the Clemson University page from a few weeks ago. Regarding that, nearly every major university’s page has rankings of some sort on the page and they were being arbitrarily removed. There is controversy as to how accurate those rankings are, but the fact of the matter is that they’re pertinent because they’re used by so many people. GromXXVII 17:54, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Axiom of choice

Regarding the edit summary in this edit, the axiom of choice is equivalent to the well-ordering theorem. In ZFC, every set is well-ordered. This includes the real numbers and the ground set of any vector space. It is true that we don't know a well-ordering of the real numbers. If we could prove the existence of a well-ordering of the real numbers without using the (nonconstructive) well-ordering theorem, then choice would not be independent of ZF. Michael Slone (talk) 02:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Good point, my mistake. Though the supposed proof still seems to hinge on countability. Perhaps I’m thinking too sequentially, but the statement Create the subset of all elements not linearly dependent on their predecessors seems to require enumerating the vectors. In particular because without enumerating the vectors it’s not clear if that’s possible. Might be able to do it with transfinite induction, but I currently am not familiar enough with it to do so. GromXXVII (talk) 13:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
That proof did use an implicit transfinite induction. You may prefer the following proof, which uses Zorn's lemma to avoid transfinite induction. Fix a vector space and consider the poset of linearly independent sets in that vector space ordered by inclusion. Since an arbitrary union of nested linearly independent sets is linearly independent, chains in this poset are bounded above. By Zorn's lemma, there exists a maximal linearly independent set. Maximality implies that the set is a basis. Michael Slone (talk) 15:15, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Best evidence

Genetic evidence is usually taken as the gold standard these days, and has been used in many instances to correct trees built using all other types of evidence. See, for example, this. I'm probably somewhat biased in this regard, though, coming from the molecular end of the evolutionary spectrum.

I agree the section needs references and a lot of other work, but that's what we do here, eh. Graft | talk 04:09, 16 May 2008 (UTC)