User talk:Toby Bartels/2002

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Hi Toby, and welcome! Thanks for your work in the math area. The morphism/homomorphism situation was really a mess. AxelBoldt

Thanks, Axel. Sorry for not responding earlier; I didn't notice that I'd sprouted a talk page ^_^. -- Toby

Shame on you, Toby, for creating pitiful stubs like Lebesgue :-)

Goodness, you're watching me closely, Miguel. -- Toby Bartels (2002/04/17)

Thank you Toby, I deeply appreciate your solidarity !!!
BTW, there's a fresh painful lot of new "bad English" on Nicolaus Copernicus... :-))) --Gianfranco

You're welcome, John Frank (^_^). But I'm busy going through the abstract math pages, and I don't think that I'll be looking at Polish astronomers soon. -- Toby Bartels, Monday, May 20, 2002

Hope I didn't inadvertently add to the confusion about the horizontal line test in Surjection et al. -- Tarquin

No, I'm pretty sure that it was all my fault ^_^. BTW, sorry for not responding earlier; the watchlist doesn't keep track of [[User Talk:]] pages. -- Toby Bartels, Monday, June 24, 2002

Toby, do you know if there's a useful notion of "boundedness" for (subsets of) uniform spaces? AxelBoldt, Friday, June 14, 2002

I've never heard of one, and can't think of one. (Of course, there's totally bounded, but that's completely different.) In fact, I can prove that no such concept exists, in a certain sense, because boundedness of metric spaces is not preserved by uniform homeomorphism; in fact, every metric space is uniformly equivalent to a bounded metric space. (Of course, this sort of reasoning didn't stop people from defining that horrid term topologically complete, now did it?) I suppose that we could call a uniform space, say, "absolutely bounded", if it cannot be metrised as an unbounded space. Examples include compact spaces and (vacuously) nonmetrisable uniform spaces; I don't know if there are any others. But this doesn't strike me offhand as a useful concept; in any case, I've never seen it anywhere. BTW, sorry for not responding earlier; the watchlist doesn't keep track of [[User Talk:]] pages. -- Toby Bartels, Monday, June 24, 2002

Hi, Ortolan88 here. I am not quite sure what error I made in the "Votes for deletion page". I can't follow this comment "there must be a carriage return at the end of vote pages for them to function properly." I wasn't there to vote on anything, just to comment on two items Fab and Reason that had been nominated. Therefore, I edited the page and added my comments. Are you saying that the software requires an additional CR? I certainly don't remember at this point whether I typed one or not. I previewed the page and got no error. As I say, I am confused, and here to learn. Ortolan88

Toby,

I see you included the phrase "firestorm of protest" in the Current Events entry for Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Where was this? I saw some suggestions that it might not be a direct human ancestor, but nothing that I'd characterize as a firestorm, in the articles I read--Science, Nature News Update, the BBC, New Scientist, and Newsday. Vicki Rosenzweig

No, that text was (to judge from the histoy) added by User:Zoe. I merely put some links in the text afterwards. -- Toby Bartels, Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Thanks. I'll ask her about it, then. Vicki Rosenzweig

Hi Toby -- please feel free to weigh in on the History standards page! JHK

Hi Toby -- Although it's kind of nice to hear, unless you're being snide (which is what some people have been known to be but I don't think you are), I'm just plain Jules or Julie -- I only pull out the Dr. gun when I'm dealing with particularly recalcitrant types who need to realize that there are specialists on the site. There are actually too many PhDs lurking for me to be the only one who goes by Dr.!! ;-) JHK

I didn't know what the "J" stands for, and "Hofmann" sounded wrong. But "Julie" it is from now on. -- Toby Bartels, Friday, July 19, 2002

RE the Saint thing -- you can probably find the discussion under one of the List of Saints or Saint talk pages -- but there are tons of saints already done in the 'Teresa of Avila' format, so changing the way we do them would be an incredible amount of work. I don't think anybody really cares about the format that much, but I certainly don't want to spend my time re-doing what might be a hundred articles ;-) JHK

I found a discussion at Talk:List of saints. It didn't seem to have as clear a conclusion as your suggested guidelines, although the list there does seem to follow them. However, I don't object to "Teresa of Avila" -- it's a fine name. I object to "Stephen". Everybody knows him as "Saint Stephen"; it's how we distinguish him from the million other Stephens in the world. Even Saint Stephen of Hungary wouldn't be called just "Saint Stephen" (except perhaps in Hungary). Is it possible to find a disambiguator -- surname, "of" name, even "the Apostle" if needed -- for every saint? Then we don't need "Saint". Otherwise, I'd use it. -- Toby 19:09 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)

Regarding your suggestion:

This contains edit history, so should not be deleted IMO. (Next time use move function -- once you can, that is.)

I guess this means that *sigh* I'll have to ask for admin privileges. I hate hierarchies, but if I need to get my hands on the advanced features link MOVE, I guess there's no other way... --Ed Poor

Actually, what I meant by "once you can" is that I think that the time is near when you'll be able to without being a sysop. FWIW, I asked for sysop powers in order to make edits to protected pages, again a power likely to be devolved soon (although perhaps not as likely or as soon as the move feature). Once I'm satisfied with the powers of old hands, I intend to ask to be dropped from sysop status. -- Toby 03:50 Aug 9, 2002 (PDT)

I just saw your note of appreciation -- thank you! It's amazing how much disagreement and apparent discord goes on in the 'pedia when in fact everyone pretty much respects one another. Amazing. I guess the wiki concept forces us to cooperate becuase we all have pretty much the same power. --mav

You're welcome! I hate to think that I might be sucked into doing real sysop work (checking recent changes, deleting junk pages, blocking IPs), rather than the old hand powers that I really want (moving pages, editing protected pages). Can y'all handle it without me? (Once Special:Newusers is up, however, I'll help out there!) -- Toby 01:23 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)

Toby, there is a vote on the city naming issue at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names). Since you participated in the debate, you may want to let your vote be counted as well. Jeronimo

Thanks for moving the comments out of the city naming votes; the counts were getting hard to follow. Eclecticology

Toby, I agree about deleting redirects. I'll slow down. Come to think of it, redirects from "incorrect" to "correct" spellings may well be one of the prime uses of the REDIRECT feature. Thank you for calling my attention to my excessive zeal. --Ed Poor

No problem! There have been people complaining before about too many REDIRECTs for spelling errors, although in this case the argument was not to delete such REDIRECTs but to stop making them deliberately. I can hardly blame you for taking this further, but I'm glad that you agreed with my explanation. -- Toby 01:06 Aug 16, 2002 (PDT)

Toby, I copied your comment about crediting the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia Talk:1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and left a request for you to review what is on the subject page. I was trying to follow your lead in what I wrote. Ortolan88 17:32 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)

Toby, I left two comments on talk:Normal space and talk:Regular space for you. AxelBoldt 14:44 Sep 1, 2002 (PDT)

"Picture is coming soon — remind me if it doesn't show up by August 19" -- Hausdorff_space

Sept. 14

Hi Toby. If you're really looking for punishment on the Orders of M pages, I suggest you start with the chain of time units. I'm planning of gradually working my way through the kg chain. cheers. -- Tarquin 21:21 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

Every time you state "ignore" when editing your ToDo list I feel a strong urge to peek inside. Perhaps stating this has the opposite effect that is desired. ;) --mav

You can look if you wish. I just don't think that it's terribly exciting, especially when I save the page only to generate a time stamp, but I won't feel guilty if you're bored because you disobey me. -- Toby 11:11 Sep 22, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for noting my unintentional edits on the Talk:Lincoln page -- I find it rather worrying, since as far as I remember I have not used any outside editor, only the standard text block in Netscape. Strangely, when I edited the page again, the same problem did not re-appear, no idea what caused it. By the way, for you the change was from an apostrophe to a funny symbol, and from a funny symbol to a dash -- for me it was from a funny symbol (denoted '?' by Netscape) to another funny symbol, and from a dash to another dash. Andre Engels 11:45 Sep 24, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for restoring my user page -- someone had vandalized it & I just blanked it as a quick fix.

bob

I wasn't sure if the blanking (done by an anonymous editor) was you or not. You can restore any page to a previous version by going to the page's history, following the link on the time stamp to a display of the old version, and editing that old version. -- Toby 06:57 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Toby, I notice that over on Wikipedia:FAQ you changed the "Using Wikipedia" link to "Reading", noting that you get something out of contributing, too. I called it "Using" to cover questions a little broader than simply looking up topics; I was thinking about how people could use material from Wikipedia in their own projects, etc. Are you terribly opposed to the word "Using"? :) --Stephen Gilbert

I'll reply at Wikipedia talk:FAQ. -- Toby 05:10 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

hi Toby,
I'm a beginner in (real) math, but your site really helps in making things clear. I was looking at the Hausdorff space and noticed that the figure isn't yet available. Could you place it?

Hi... I noticed that you moved Schrodinger equation to Schroedinger equation. That's fine, but could you also change all the links to the old page to skip the redirect? Thanks.

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Schrodinger_equation

-- CYD

I didn't realise that there were any redirects to Schrodinger equation; I usually remember to look for such things. But somebody else must have gotten to them, since there aren't any anymore. (Of course, there are several ordinary links to Schrodinger equation, but that's not a problem; "Schrodinger" is an acceptable spelling.) -- Toby 11:21 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

Toby, have you heard anything about the correctness of the purported proof of the Poincare conjecture? I keep asking around on usenet and irc and I have yet to hear any opinion. I looked through the paper, and it seems to me that he indeed proves what he claims to prove, but it is not clear that that actually is equivalent to the Poincare conjecture. AxelBoldt 18:22 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)

No, I haven't heard anything definite. The opinion of people around me is that, what with all the false leads in the past of the lack of groundbreaking new territory in the present paper, we shouldn't get our hopes up. But I don't really know anybody in a position to really judge, so ultimately, I just don't know. (The only thing that I can say for sure is that it's too early to tell for certain!) -- Toby 10:06 Oct 31, 2002 (UTC)

I'm now starting to hear people saying that it's wrong. -- Toby 16:27 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, that's my impression too: he starts from the wrong definitions. AxelBoldt 18:23 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)

This is user:Hotlorp, leaving a message for Toby! Sorry, left it on your main page first!

Howdy Toby:

I just created a WikiProject for math; aka Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics. I'd love to see any input comments, etc. you might have. Cheers. Chas zzz brown 23:58 Nov 17, 2002 (UTC)

You forgot the image on the page about Hausdorff spaces, ie: Picture is coming soon — remind me if it doesn't show up by September 25. blah blah.

/m

Toby, if you have access to a good number theory book or to a number theory buddy: could you clarify the "Extended Riemann hypothesis" versus the "Generalized Riemann hypothesis" for me? Are they the same, and if not, which one does our article Extended Riemann hypothesis describe? Information on the web is contradictory. Thanks a lot, AxelBoldt 00:53 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)

I talked to Michel Lapidus, a mathematical physicist here at UCR that I thought knew something about the Riemann hypothesis. Well, he's actually writing an essay (200 pages so far) on some analogies between the ERH and some aspects of physics, so he was ready to talk a lot. First, he confirms that the ERH and the GRH are exactly the same thing. Then he also says that it goes far beyond what we have on our page, including some cases involving finite fields that have been proved. He gave me a reference:

Peter Sarnak, "L-functions", in the Proc ICM Berlin 1998:

which I will look at over the weekend if I can find it here. -- Toby 02:11 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks! AxelBoldt 18:23 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)

Hello. I've just noticed that for italicising mathematical variables, you've been replacing the wiki quotation marks with "<i>" and "</i>". I've done the opposite in the past, so I'd be grateful if you'd let me know if there's some reason for doing it this way that I haven't thought of. Thanks! -- Oliver Pereira 18:06 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

The reason is that the wiki markup "''...''" produces the HTML markup "<em>...</em>", while "<i>...</i>" produces "<i>...</i>" (as you would expect). While most (if not all) visual browsers render these the same, they have different meanings, and they may be rendered differently in some other contexts. For example, a voice browser might modulate the sound to emphasise <em> but not <i>. This is because <i> is font information (such as is appropriate in mathematical formulæ), not information about the importance of a word. You can also set up lynx to distinguish them. The same things holds for "'''...'''" vs "<b>...</b>", only more so, since we reserve the former for the major terms that an article discusses (proposed to be used in ranking our internal searches).

BTW, some of my earlier work uses <var> instead of <i>, but this is wrong.

-- Toby 18:24 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying that! It all makes sense now. I'd just assumed that "''...''" turned into "<i>...</i>". I'll go back and revert my earlier changes at some point... -- Oliver Pereira 18:34 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Indenting bad. By the way, telling me to ignore something is probably the surest way to get me to pay attention to it. ;) -- Oliver Pereira 19:09 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

I don't think that indenting is particularly bad, but I believe that it's overused in our talk pages; I prefer to save it for retroactive interruptions. I only edited this one because I feel entitled to be dogmatic about the formatting of my own user pages. As for the "Ignore." note, that is provided only for a service to those that watch a user page of mine for replies, to know that it's nothing that concerns them. If you choose to ignore the "Ignore.", then you're the only one that will suffer, through the incredible boredom that will surely result. (See a post of mav's earlier on this page about the same subject.) -- Toby 21:55 Nov 28, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Toby. Great work on the ZF axiom pages! I've linked them from the "ZF axiom" page too. -- Tarquin 10:45 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Toby 20:46 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

Epib lw gwc umiv Q lqlv'b omb bpm rwsm? -xpui

Q uqacvlmzabwwl gwcz kwuumvb. -- Bwjg 01:20 Vwd 30, 2002 (CBK)

I notice that you redirected the entry for Tubingen. Is it "correct" in Wikipedia to do it this way? I made an entry for Östersund in Sweden, and then later changed it to Ostersund, because I thought that wikipedia names should be anglicised. For me this is a problem area -- I'd actually prefer it your way, with redirects of anglicised versions of place names (and perhaps also people names -- see Ångström, but someone else changed my original Ångström (which I'd changed from the anglicised version), so after that I've anglicised everything!

This is a matter of some recent controversy. But it seems to be correct (so far) that anglicisation in Wikipedia doesn't go so far as to remove diacriticals (or what appear to be diacriticals from an English perspective) from names in an alphabet supported by Latin-1 when these names aren't commonly known otherwise in English. Thus Anders Jonas Ångström is correct -- but so is angstrom, a common noun widely used in (technical) English (although NIST says that "ångström" is correct).

Incidentally, it seems to me that in wikipedia the use of &Aring; and even the direct use of Å (in Times Roman) from the character map in Win XP both give lousy results. Is this well known? Is there a fix? User:David Martland

Do you mean that they look bad (and they should give identical results) in the font that Wikipedia uses? It looks fine to me (on Netscape 6 for Unix on a Sun Solaris -- apparently the complete opposite of your system ^_^). In particular, it's correct that the bottom of the ring touches the top of the "A". (There is also an approved form "Aa" for "Å" when necessary; then "ångström" becomes "aangstroem", which nobody would ever recognise ^_^.) -- Toby 18:34 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)

I discovered that it is (a) browser dependent, and (b) size dependent. In IE 6, the ring on top of the A is OK, but the font size appears larger. In Netscape 7 and Multizilla the A and the ring merge, so that it doesn't look good. If the page is enlarged to 120% or greater, the problem is fixed. The Aa combination is used in Danish (e.g., in Aarlborg or Aarhus, and is also allowed in Swedish, but hardly anyone ever uses it in Sweden. -- User:David Martland

Well, there's probably nothing that we can do about that -- other than test a variety of fonts at a variety of sizes in a variety of browsers on a variety of machines to find which has the fewest screwups. Also, thanks for the Swedish usage note. -- Toby 20:03 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)

Interesting about Low German, translated the article into Swedish. Would you consider Swedish also be closely related to the Low german? We use the better (bättre), and while in South africa, I was astonished about how close Afrikaans and Swedish were. Although we had strong influence from the german in medieval time, I have heard theories about our market places Birkas, being established by the Frisians, and I have a feeling this people (due to its Baltic sea dominance during premedieval time) had a large influence in the Swedish community between 500 and 1000. Would be happy for any short comment on this. Dan.

Since the /t/ in "bättre" is the original from Proto-Germanic, it's no surprise that it exists in both Low German and Swedish. And I've always seen Swedish classified as North Germanic, with Low German as West Germanic. OTOH, I also know that the divisions among the Germanic languages are not very well defined, so one would expect a lot of influence between neighbouring languages. -- Toby 07:35 Dec 1, 2002 (UTC)

Hi, nice of you to take your time to travel north, your surely right about frankiska, but there might also be risk of confusion with whatever they speak in German Franken.

That's Upper Franconian, I believe.
I meant in Swedish. //Dan

Anyhow, I wait with the most unpatient tension on the article about Proto-Germanic, since I have the feeling some dialogue about this could be very developing for both of us. Dan Koehl.

Probably, but I don't think that I'll be in a position to write that anytime soon. Language is only a hobby for me, I mostly work on the math pages. -- Toby 09:34 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks again, translated your Swedish userpage. Dan Koehl 08:16 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw! -- Toby 22:15 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Toby, glad you made it here, your page is translated, with request for english in communication with you. / Dan Koehl 15 december 2002 kl.09:09 (CET)

Cool, thanks! -- Toby 16 december 2002 kl.19:18 (CET)