User talk:Joshua Davis

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Contents 1 Technical articles in physics 2 No need to apologize 3 Talk:physics/wip 4 Parity 5 tachyons 6 Article needing your attention 7 GCE and diversions 8 Please have a look 9 A new search engine for books -- Zercle.com 10 Your opinion valued 11 Peer review for the list of baryons

[edit] Technical articles in physics

In your page User:Joshua_Davis, you wrote

"One thing that I found very nice about mathematics articles on Wikipedia is that there are many technical articles that I can go to for use in my research."

I followed the link mathematics to check out an article like List_of_trigonometric_identities. I agree; I like to see more technical details that would be useful for learning and research. Perhaps you may want to check out the article Configuration integral (statistical mechanics) to see whether this type of technical article is what you meant? Vql (talk) 16:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No need to apologize

Hi Joshua, and welcome here. I just came to say that you don't need to apologize as profusely as you did in your edit summary, especially since you're making a good point.

As you have probably noticed, Wikipedia can be a rather strange place with hidden customs. You seem to be doing very well, but if you ever want to ask a question, feel free to contact me. Keep up the good work! Cheers, Jitse Niesen (talk) 09:40, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:physics/wip

In behalf of SFC9394, might I ask that you contribute some moderation and/or content for this page. Speaking for the prior contributors, --Ancheta Wis 06:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Parity

Hi Joshua, please reconsider your comments about parity. The parity operator is the operator that takes one between the disconnected components of a group (typically the two components of a rotation group). Ergo, the parity operator can never have determinant +1, since unitary/orthogonal transforms perserve the determinant, and det=+1 is the determinant of the connected component containing the identity. linas 15:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] tachyons

Can you check what I added to tachyon? Rotiro 10:20, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article needing your attention

Hi, can you please look at: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fluid entropy and vote? I think more physicists should participate in that particular vote. Thanks. Dan Gluck 13:54, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GCE and diversions

I had a feeling you were looking for something else. It's interesting that you mention black holes as an example of a non-extensive system...have you come across the work of Constantino Tsallis, and in particular, his nonextensive entropy? --HappyCamper 16:26, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I'll ask around for "Landau potential" - if I find anything I'll let you know. Cheers! --HappyCamper 06:16, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

This reminds me of grand potential...more later. --HappyCamper 20:40, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please have a look

Hi Joshua. Following PhysPhD's request, I've looked at this article which seems to be on the border of WP:OR and in my opinion deserved deletion due to WP:NOTE (all references except for the book have 8 citations at most) and possibly WP:COI (note the username of the article's author). As for the book (reference no. 1 of the article), I didn't read it of course. Before nominating it for deletion, I wanted to hear your opinion. Thanks. Dan Gluck 06:57, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A new search engine for books -- Zercle.com

Hi Joshua,

I would like to invite you and other Wikipedians to check out Zercle.com, which is a search engine for nonfiction books that I've just launched.

Zercle is designed to solve a problem that often plagues us on book sites such as Amazon.com: We spend a huge amount of time trying (and usually failing) to get an idea of what books are available in our particular categories of interest. For example, if you enter "Group Theory" in the search box at Amazon you'll get a hodgepodge of 1431 results, the first page of which is mostly psychology books! It's ridiculous.

What if you want a list of all undergraduate-level books in "Group Theory" that are in-print? Good luck. There's currently no way to get that information, unless you want to spend a few days going through 1431 results. In effect, we're still very much in the Stone Age when it comes to answering such questions.

With Zercle, however, volunteer editors will create, edit and maintain book groups which contain all of the books that are currently in-print in a given category. Zercle has developed a special method for analyzing the core subject of a book to determine which group or groups are appropriate for the book. This is all detailed in the "Instructions for book group editors" page.

Zercle is like Wikipedia in that it is edited by volunteers and thus starts off with very little content being there for users. Unlike Wikipedia, however, Zercle requires editors to register and that they be "knowledgeable enough" in the subject areas that they edit.

I've already started building a few groups on Zercle myself, in the "quantum mechanics" area, since I'm knowledgeable enough there (BS Physics). If you enter "quantum mechanics" into the Title box on the Zercle front page you'll see those groups. If you also enter, say, "Griffiths" into the Author box, you'll see the specific group which contains the QM book written by that author. I've only just started these groups, so none of them are yet complete. But, as I've already alluded, the idea is to eventually have groups that are complete, so that users can easily discover what books are available in their categories of interest, and authors can pretty much be guaranteed that users have an easy way of discovering their book.

Once Zercle gets going we will no longer have to waste countless hours on Amazon only to get a tiny glimpse of what books are available in our particular categories of interest. We'll simply enter the title (or title words and maybe an author's last name) from any book in the category into the Zercle query box, and instantly have at our fingertips a *complete* list of the other books in that category, with links to their corresponding Amazon pages.

Editors are needed in all non-fiction category areas (Zercle does not support *fiction* books). For more info, go to http://www.zercle.com/ and look at the "About" page. For questions/comments: paul at zercle dot com.

Thanks very much for reading this.

Paul White (developer of Zercle)

Emwave 23:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your opinion valued

Would you care to take a look at WP:Articles_for_deletion/Martin_Greiter ? I voted for deletion, but your opinion either way would be useful. Some of the more recent votes look like an effort at vote-stacking by fake users. Dark Formal (talk) 17:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Peer review for the list of baryons

Hi,

I noticed that you had an interest in particle physics, so I wondered you could head over the List of baryons and Talk:List of baryons pages a give some feedback. I'm currently trying to bring that article to Featured List status, but I'm not a particle physicist so I probably made half a dozen mistakes. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Headbomb (talk · contribs) 21:38, 23 April 2008 (UTC)