User talk:MisterSheik

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Contents 1 Métis 2 COTW 3 WikiProject Contract bridge 4 Thanks 5 Color edits 6 K-L divergence 7 The word "outcomes" & recent edits to pages on information theory 8 Thanks for conditional entropy edits 9 Vanilla : pod or bean ? 10 1a 11 sign! 12 desiredata 13 C Sharp edits 14 Request for edit summary 15 Fairy-wren 16 D-separation 17 Lower bound for comparison sort 18 Unbelievable... 19 Simple English 20 cost of enameled cast iron 21 Coconut Oil 22 Transition to the New Order

[edit] Métis

Saw your apt suggestion about Métis and moved the article, as explained at Talk:Métis and substituted a stub. If you can supply some information about Vietnamese métis but don't want to edit the article, you could leave the information on the talk page for someone else to put in. That's how I got to contribute to the French article – left my copy which was then corrected by the people who can actually speak French and added to the article. John FitzGerald 18:43, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like how you fixed things up :)

[edit] COTW

Congratulations, First Indochina War has been voted this week's Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week. Please edit it to help raise it to featured article status.

[edit] WikiProject Contract bridge

Hi. You might be interested in participating in new Wikipedia:WikiProject Contract bridge. Regards, Duja 10:17, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks for the great copyedit on Canada -- Jeff3000 21:15, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Color edits

Hi Mistersheik. Sorry for saying you were anonymous, which was a careless error on my part. But you did not explain your edit, and I think it would have been better to do so. Why a link to Phosphor? Because the paragraph is specifically about objects that "emit light that they generate themselves", and phosphors are a major genus of objects that do that. In fact, they cover a good number of those that emit light "for other reasons", as the text says immediately before the link in question. (Why have this link rather than one to Phosphorescence? I see little reason to prefer one rather than the other. But since you like it better, I'll now change it to that.) Anyway, it is reasonable after such a link to link also to List of light sources, because that moves from the specific that had just been treated to something more general, rounding off the discussion of emission of light. OK, I'll make that compromise change I mentioned; and I'll post this note also in the Discussion page. – Noetica 10:31, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment Noetica. Sometimes I don't comment my smaller edits, but I'll be sure to detail my changes to the colour article from now on. I thought phosphorescence made more sense given that we are already linking to chemoluminescence and incandescence. Phosphor is just a substance that exhibits phosphorescence, so I think it would go better with things like light bulb and lucigenin. I'll put this comment on the colour page too; I'm not sure if I'm supposed to answer you here... Ciao MisterSheik 10:43, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] K-L divergence

Response on the talk page. Jheald 16:08, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The word "outcomes" & recent edits to pages on information theory

You seem to have misunderstood the (loose, everyday) sense in which the word "outcomes" was being used in some of your recent edits to various pages on information theory. See Talk:Information_entropy#H(X), H(Ω), and the word 'outcome' for a discussion of the misunderstanding.

Could you fix some of the errors you have introduced, please ?

In general H(X), not H(Ω), is what these pages should be introducing and discussing. Jheald 11:48, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It's quite possible that I've misunderstood what's needed, but maybe you could spare a moment to explain it to me? I agree with you that H(X) is what we talk about. But, I renamed range of values of X to outcomes associated with X; aren't the range of values of X a subset of Ω? Aren't we talking about outcomes in both cases? (That is, isn't a discreet random variable X defined as a function from Omega to reals?) I just wanted to use a term that was defined in probability theory. Perhaps more information needs to me merged from random variable into probability theory?

MisterSheik 16:11, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem with the word "outcomes" was that they seem to be defined as outcomes on Ω. But a random variable X can map lots of different outcomes on Ω to a single value x_j on X(Ω).

If {ω_i} are the "outcomes", what is the word for the (smaller?) set of values {x_j} that they map to?

I wasn't sure, which is why I have stuck with "values". Perhaps you can dig out an authoritative frequentist textbook that will tell us? Jheald 16:29, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Incidentally, regarding the page on probability theory, what's there at the moment is a page basically on measure theory, and rather a pale shadow of the much better introduction at measure (mathematics). At the moment, IMO probability theory is so wide of the mark of what a page on probability theory should really be about, that it might be best just to nuke it and turn it simply into a redirect to probability. Jheald 16:35, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I think we should nuke probability space and replace that with what's at probability theory. Then, do exactly as you say. What do you think? (possibly splitting the probability axioms out and moving them to probability axioms) --MisterSheik 16:39, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, according to mathworld [1], it seems that the smaller set of values is called state space according to at least one mathematician... --MisterSheik 16:41, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Your recent edits to the information theory article are incomplete; for example, the penultimate quantity declares that it is the final quantity. Cut-and-paste is not good enough; please proofread and edit this or I'll revert (though you can always use your reverted copy as a reference). More importantly, your edits lengthen the article; the intent in having a separate quantities of information article is to conform (somewhat) with Wikipedia:Article size#Splitting an article. I realize that important information is missing from the article, but those who desire it will go to the linked articles; the article should be an overview of the topic. For example, divergence is important, but &mdash unlike entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information — it is not needed to understand the most basic ideas of compression and communication, so including it for completeness is unnecessary. Considering this and the frequency of your edits, perhaps a sandbox or talk page would be a better place to make your edits before incorporating them into the article itself. Calbaer 21:02, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, if you bring it to the talk page, you may find that people support including divergence, and thus your changes aren't likely to be reverted for purely cosmetic reasons. Calbaer 21:05, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments on my talk page. You're right that I should probably use a sandbox to do my edits instead of doing them one-by-one: I ended up getting distracted, and left things a bit sloppy (though I think it's still moving in the right direction).

I guess what I find is that my use of wikipedia is as a reference (so that I often have a question that I'm trying to answer) and that I don't read pages from start to finish. For that reason, my edits are geared to keeping articles structured so that information can be quickly found and to keep out redundancy so that you don't waste time reading things twice. With that in mind, I hope that the quantities of information section on the inf. the. page will have a list of all of the quantities of information, and will mathematically express them in terms of entropies, so that it's easy to understand them all as a whole.

Let me know what you think :)

MisterSheik 23:26, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

If we had "all of the quantities of information," we'd have to include Tsallis_entropy, Rényi entropy (and divergence, mutual information, etc.), min-entropy, entropy of degree alpha, differential entropy (and associated measures), guessing entropy, smooth entropy, and so forth. We should draw the line somewhere. And we should work to make the page less technical, not more so. That's why I want to watch for article creep. That being said, if anything technical deserves to be added, it's divergence. I just don't want things getting out of hand, either in terms of quantity or quality. Calbaer 23:51, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

You're right. However, right now, the information theory article has three sections: history, applications, and quantities of information. An article about information theory should really, like you say, summarize the main points of information theory. For that reason, I'm not really convinced that quantities of information is a good idea for another article (unless it is expanded to include the measures that you mentioned.) In my case, I was looking for some information and had to check 4 different articles to find it. Ideally, I should see how the main quanties are related on one page, and if I need more information I can find it on the subpages.MisterSheik 01:33, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

What information were you looking for? And why isn't "quantities of information" a good article to have? By the way, I haven't had time to look at your latest edits, but thanks for keeping the length down on the article. Calbaer 18:07, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for conditional entropy edits

Thanks for your phrasing changes on conditional entropy; I think your phrasing is clearer than mine was. (I can only plead that I originally wrote the intro a few years ago, and hopefully my writing's improved since then.) Good work. -- Creidieki 18:47, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vanilla : pod or bean ?

Hi,
Of course they are pods but they are so often called beans  !(on Google : 48,900 occurings for vanilla pods, 364,000 for vanilla beans). So, if you choose to be accurate in the article, you need to explain that the word bean though of common use is not right. Channer 13:24, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 1a

Thanks for your corrections; how did they creep in? How embarrassing! Tony 02:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] sign!

Could you please sign your comments on talk pages? All it takes is for tildes: ~~~~. That automatically puts your user name and the date and time of the edit there. Michael Hardy 17:16, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] desiredata

People don't understand what that means, there is no wiki definition for it, and it is not in the dictionary. You are doing a disservice to wikipedians by putting this back in the article. Daniel.Cardenas 18:39, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi, it is in the dictionary: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/desiderata. I am all for simplifying things, but sometimes you need a word to explain something. I removed a whole paragraph that someone wrote about Shannon discovering information entropy from those desiderata, which I was able to do because having that word makes it clear that that's what happened. Part of the beauty of mathematics is the way in which it is discovered, and that's what that word does: it illuminates the process of discovery. Otherwise, you might as well rename the section properties. But they aren't properties; they're desiderata!

Look at some of my edits-- I'm all for keeping things simple. Absolutely: prefer the simple to the complex. But, you might also scrutinize your edits: prefer one word to many; prefer the specific to the vague.  :) It's not as simple as wiping out every word that you don't think people will understand. Regards, MisterSheik 18:44, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] C Sharp edits

Good work over at the C# article! Angus Lepper 22:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for edit summary

Hi Mr Sheik. I have a small request. It would be good if you could use the edit summary more often, it helps others understand what you changed and looks good in the article history. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:52, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fairy-wren

To answer your presumably rhetorical question (do you capitalise dog?), no, but it is ornithological convention to capitalise the common names of species, and we follow that convention on Wikipedia. It has been discussed at length, please see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)#Capitalization of common names of species, as well as the archived talk pages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds. Hope this helps! Sabine's Sunbird talk 07:23, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] D-separation

Hello,

I noticed a comment in one of your edits in the Bayesian network article said 'merged from d-separation.' The D-separation article has been deleted. Do you know which admin deleted it? I think it should either be restored or d-separation should be discussed at far greater length in the main Bayesian network article itself. Unfortunately the delete happened a while ago, and I can't find it in the logs anymore.

Silya 23:52, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Sure, discuss it at far greater length. Since d-separation only applies to Bayesian networks, and was such a short article, it didn't make sense to have a page devoted to it. It made more sense as part of the description of Bayesian network. Good luck! MisterSheik 11:03, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lower bound for comparison sort

I noticed that you deleted part of my addition to Comparison sort because you thought it redundant. I agree that technically it does not give any information that is not repeated later on, but I think it's very important didactically. For one thing, it provides a link to Information theory which is important for people not familiar with that subject. More importantly, it briefly but clearly states the premises for that result. Too often this lower bound is quoted without stating clearly and exactly the assumptions under which it holds. This then leads to other people coming up with counterexamples outside of its applicability, with confusion resulting. I wrote my contribution mainly to end that confusion. Do you see my point? Grotendeels Onschadelijk 01:57, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I have now (approximately) reinstated the first paragraph, which captures as briefly as possible the gist of the section and can be read on its own by someone who does not wish to read the whole story. Instead, I have removed a glaring repetition from the second paragraph. As far as I can see, there is nothing else that can be cut without decreasing readability. Grotendeels Onschadelijk 10:54, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unbelievable...

Vow! :) --Merzul 20:18, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Or, well, it was the kind of obvious reply one can't resist giving... --Merzul 20:21, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

ha ha yeah. There should be a script that highlights useless added phrases and asks the editor if she's sure she wants to add them. My favourite is "it should be noted that". MisterSheik 21:43, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Simple English

Your writing style is in the context of Simple English Wikipedia. At Wikipedia we are allowed to use full English to describe and add context to articles. Please stop posting to my talk page, I will no longer respond to you. Chessy999 (talk) 11:54, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Chessy: If you aren't up for engaging in civil discussion about the content of an article, why are you editing this encyclopedia? I am not talking about using simple english; I am talking about using plain English. "Removing redundancy will not damage the meaning [of an article], and in most cases will strengthen it. Crisp, elegant writing demands the elimination of redundancy." The phrase "with endeavor" is clearly redundant once you have stated the motives of the dogs. Obstinately reinserting superfluous words belies an ignorance about the meaning of those words. Please don't edit the article until you're ready to discuss your changes. MisterSheik (talk) 23:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] cost of enameled cast iron

Ok, how do I cite this without linking to a commercial site? FiveRings (talk) 06:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but I have no idea. I think it's fine to say that they are more expensive; giving actual prices is a bad idea because it makes a lot of assumptions (which marketplace, used/new, sizes, and so on....) MisterSheik (talk) 03:41, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Coconut Oil

Coconut oil in the context of this article is not the same thing as sodium cocoyl isethionate, which is a semi-synthetic surfactant salt produced from coconut oil. I see where some MSDS sheets are called coconut oil a synonym for sodium cocoyl isethionate, but this makes no sense from a chemistry perspective. Halogenated (talk) 05:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

You're right. Thanks for fixing it :) MisterSheik (talk) 18:45, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Transition to the New Order

Hi - thanks for your comment - a perfectly good point. I've responded on the talk page. Here cheers --Merbabu (talk) 06:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)