User talk:Icek

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Welcome!

Hello, Icek, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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!  NTK 10:57, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Blue in infrared

Indeed, parts of the spectra outside the visible are often referred to using 'colours'. Blue represents simply shorter wavelengths and red longer. Such 'shifted' colours are also used on graphs. Please refer to the reference 3. quoted in the article for more information. Eurocommuter 18:52, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lower flux, larger diameter

(Your edit of 2003 UB313 on 2006-04-27). Hi, Icek. Indeed, my text could mislead but I’m afraid so can yours; we can do better. What I arguably failed to express is that if Bertoldi (thermal method) did assume a different position,..., he would come with a lower estimate. Regards. Eurocommuter 19:16, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

(follow up on your reply). Yes, it’s better but I think I got into a complicated statement by mentioning unnecessarily equator-on position. What do you think about simplifying the statement and putting an unambiguous footnote, something like this…

Assuming further the highest diameter (2500 km) and pole-on position of the object 1 the difference between the results would appear consistent…

1If the object is in pole-on position the side facing the Sun (and the observer) gets hotter producing stronger emissions thus resulting in overestimation of the diameter using the thermal method.. Eurocommuter 19:42, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Teleological argument

Your wrote:

Hi Mel Etitis, why do you consider my addition about the third premise ("The assumption of such an "undesigned designer" implies that one does not conduct scientific inquiry beyond some arbitrary point and instead accepts the "undesigned designer" as a dogma") inaccurate? Icek 21:37, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I should have explained on the Talk page (I've been trying to catch up on a backlog, and have been editing in haste recently). The problem is that it ignores the ontological argument, as well as other arguments offered by various philosophers of religion (e.g., Swinburne). I agree that none of the arguments works, but it's incorrect to imply that it's a simple, unexplained, unargued dogma. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:41, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pan-STARRS

I've replied on my talk page. In a nutshell, this comes from the Jewitt paper (listed in external links). -- Curps 06:09, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Abundance of the chemical elements

Hello Icek, you commented about a table I transcripted to the article. The table is exactly as it was in the book, and, in my opinion, you're saying the same thing that is written there, it's merely an interpretation issue. I don't know how one could make it clearer though. -- Rend 04:55, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Feynman point probability

I think you must have made an error somewhere. When I do the naive calculation

(1-(1-10^{-6})^{762})\cdot 100%

I get 0.07617%, which agrees well with what the source says. Actually that way of computing it is not quite correct, because it assumes that all 762 possible ways of getting an early 999999 are independent, which they aren't (say, if there's a 999999 at position 123, the chance of finding a 999999 also at position 124 is 1/10). This makes the right answer a bit less than 0.07617%, but it cannot be what you're getting at, for even if we look for 999999's at positions that are multiples of 6 (such that the possibilities are trivially independent), I get

(1-(1-10^{-6})^{762/6})\cdot 100% = 0.01270 %

which is still larger than your value. –Henning Makholm 01:13, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Religiosity and Intelligence

Hi IceK. FYI- I've questioned your deletion of the studies by the (Australian) National Church Life Survey, and the assumption that, being church funded, it is biased towards church friendly results. See full comment at the talk page [1] . I can understand your comment, but believe it to be incorrect. WotherspoonSmith 11:05, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sweetness

Thanks for your work on the table, but what's with changing the numbers? I doubt I would have typed them all in incorrectly, so unless there's a mistake in the book I can't imagine why you would change them. Richard001 00:14, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

I saw the numbers and immediately thought that there's a 0 too much. If you look here, look at the respective Wikipedia articles or just use your favorite search engine, everywhere numbers about 1/10 of your values are presented. If you didn't make an error when copying the numbers from the book, I guess that the book is wrong (I don't have a tabletop sweetener at hand, if the amount of sweetener is on the label, you could compare the amount of sucrose equivalent to the sweetness...). Icek 20:10, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
I suppose, but it would be better if you could provide a reference here. If someone tried to check the numbers they wouldn't be supported by the current one given. A second reference explaining the error may be appropriate. Richard001 00:17, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
Now I have provided a reference; while the values for aspartame, cyclamate and saccharin are certainly closer to reality, the reference (which itself cites an article by DuBois et al. from 1991) unfortunately has other values for fructose (1.30) and glucose (0.59). The factors probably depend on the concentration used - DuBois et al. used a solution of water with 2% sucrose as a reference. Icek 22:25, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Fructose is indeed 1.30 in solution (and doesn't change with concentration), 1.75 is when assesed as a crystal. --Sensonet (talk) 13:48, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Hi. PNAS is a scientific journal that accepts research articles for publication through direct as well as indirect submission. If you have friends in the National Academy of Sciences, then they can "communicate" a maximum of two articles per year to PNAS via "Track 1". These articles do not go through the regular/normal procedure of peer review.

You can find that "Cells infected with scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease agents produce intracellular 25-nm virus-like particles" PNAS | February 6, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 6 | 1965-1970 has been "communicated" by someone called Sheldon Penman, who is indeed a member of the NAS.

If you read the said article carefully, you will find that in Figure 2D, the number of N2a+22L cells containing the so-called "virus-like particles" is less than 10%. Is it well known that N2a cells, like a lot of historical cell lines, are infected with many retroviruses that may or may not have anything to do with neurodegeneration.Edchoi 16:51, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for educating me! Icek 04:53, 28 September 2007 (UTC)