Jump to content

User talk:AxelBoldt/Archive December 2004 - December 2006

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< User talk:AxelBoldt

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by AstroNomer (talk | contribs) at 19:34, 19 August 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hi Axel. Sorry if you don't wat this here but I really wanted to compliment you on what you did on those pages above, especially on Goedel's Theorem. Very good work! -- JanHidders

Thanks for the kind words! I'm enjoying myself tremendously here and have learned a lot already :-) --Axel

Hello, I love your page. Yours is the first page I've read where I and the author are in complete agreement on almost everything. Remarkable. --KQ

Hey KQ, do you mean my home page?? Because I have never met anybody who is in almost complete agreement with that. --Axel

Yes, I do. Specifically, I was referring to politics.html, though the rest is interesting too. I disagree about the prostitution argument, though, simply because people could also give food away for free out of love or charity, though I do agree that prostitution should be legal. And I must admit to having violated a few of your rules on webdesigning.... --KQ

Regarding recycling (your home page): among green types, recycling is recognized as the least desirable choice of the reduce/reuse/recycle trio. Reduce being to reduce what you use, reuse being to use something for the same purpose more than once (standard plates vs. paper plates, for example), and recycle being, as you put it, "downcycling." I collect aluminum for recycling in my office, but I don't buy or bring aluminum cans to the office myself. --Belltower

Dear Axel,

Upon checking upon KQ comment, curiosity led me to your page, and then to http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/politics.html You are a brainy guy! But your statement "Medical research is a tremendous waste of time and money" is just plain stunning! I never thought I would ever hear anything like this -- hence "stunning". I also want people in Niger to overcome illiteracy, overcome poverty, and have access to the Internet. However, it would be wiser to speak about wrong allocation of resources or wrong priorities. Calling the work of thousands of good people and geniuses a waste of time and money is very unjust. The same research that serves a rich guy in Miami today can lead to a cure for malaria tomorrow and save millions of lives (I hope you care).

For balance, I subscribe to your ideas of "kid simulating the universe", "marriage is outdated", "marrying into the developing world", and "let's have global government" (this is quite obvious to many and we will get there one day).

However, I found your views surprising, contradictory or plain erroneous in several places. To be sure, I would first need to know what are your basic beliefs because the call to "sit still and retire early" once again proves to me how astoundingly different people walk this planet. Of further disagreements: give passports to Kosovars (I agree but ... what about those who want to get back home, what about Slobodan and justice, what about the principle of not rewarding aggression?), no breeding (if brainy people stop breeding, all your calls to change will lay in ruin -- you know why!), few links in HTML (this is against wikipedia, against your own writings on wikipedia, and against the principle that it is less harm to make a hesitant guy hesitate than to deprive a resolute guy of a choice to be informed), war on advertising (let advertisers bleed their money down the drain, read Seth Godin!), bogus e-mail (not only you fool spammers but you mess up web traffic and search engines -- why pollute to resolve pollution), web overhyped (perhaps for guys who want to "sit still", my life goes through a new renascence thanks to this knowledge goldmine), comments on Peter Duesberg and his "science" (prompted me to write an entry on Duesberg -- follow the link), and last but not least ... lots of people/companies make pretty money on the net and this is only gonna grow!

I am sure you will want to know if except for "agree" or "disagree" I was inspired. Yes, this was all put in a way that tickles "creativity centers" (I won't list them due to your dislike of medical research). The best was the idea of swapping citizenship. I never thought of it. On the top of my head, it would not work (5 million of Sierra Leoneans waiting for 3 US vacancies), but I will leave it in my memory for further processing.


btw: Why do you want no development ("sit still, retire early")? If you sit still in stagnation, how will you contact the kid that runs this universe in a computer simulation? How old are you? If you are below 27.3, your future is bright :) -- Piotr Wozniak

Piotr, I'm glad if I stimulated you; some of the "radical" statements on that page are actually intended to do just that. For instance, the "medical research is a waste of time and money" statement is intended to shock you into realizing how appallingly partial we are when it comes to applying the fruits of that research. And the "sit and retire" recommendation is supposed to point to the fact that much of our so-called activity is actually detrimental.

I also should say that this page has been created over 6 years and that I myself don't agree with all of it anymore :-)

Cheers, 

 --AxelBoldt

Aha! Still the "shock method" on medical research may backfire as one could be tempted to think "crackpot page" and click on close button in the browser. I was lucky to dig deeper :) - Is your age a secret? (btw: I am 40) There must be some page on the net which is the focus of those wanting a global government! We gotta find it and put a hand (or thumb) -- Piotr Wozniak

I'm 35 and planning my retirement. --Axel
Just think how many Wikipedia articles you could write once retired! :-) --Belltower
Believe it or not, that was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the above sentence. --Axel
Looking at your entries in the recent changes, this would be different than now because...? ;-) --Belltower
Because classes start on Monday :-( --Axel

Actually, the problem with advertising isn't that they're wasting money, but that it actually does work! We aren't quite the rational creatures we would like to believe, so advertisers can convince us we need a V-8 engine, to spend thousands on a diamond that 99% of us couldn't tell from cubic zirconium, and (worse) they convince our kids that they absolutely must have various and sundry kitschy items. By bombarding us with images of beautiful people and scenes, it alters our perceptions of the world around us. If advertising were just a way to inform us about new and potentially useful products, that would be one thing. But it's another, far more harmful thing. -- Belltower

Hi Axel--I have neglected to welcome folks since the latest Slashdotting, but you're clearly one of the most active and a very valuable member of the crew. Thanks for joining us. --Larry Sanger

Hi, and thank you for letting me play here. Yes, I'm one of the Slashdotters, but now I like it here a lot better :-) Larry, I thought you may like this. --Axel

I'm glad to see the four color theorem. A few weeks back I was tagging merchandise in different colors to correspond to different sections; we had tags in three colors and that sometimes resulted in corners where two different sections were tagged the same color, which set me off wondering if it were possible to avoid the problem with only three colors, or if not, how many would have to be used. And what do you know, that's a problem which had been vexing people for over 100 years, and solved in 1977. I'm glad I didn't waste my time trying to reinvent the wheel.  :-) --Koyaanis Qatsi

Yes, my April's fool page about Udo von Aachen can be removed. But perhaps it would be best to update it to be a page about the hoax. I have a feeling other people will be fooled and so it would be nice if they can turn to wikipedia for a debunking. --Jimbo Wales

Axel,

I just came across this email snippet between you and you and Denis Howe (the editor of FOLDOC). Any word on him wanting to merge FOLDOC with Wikipedia?

For now, and as my time permits, I'll be moving content over and editting as necessay. I mean, just compare our TeX article with his... So finally, I just wanted to thank you for your work in securing permission to use FOLDOC and also the History of computing material. It's really good stuff. -- STG

My understanding is that Denis will work on his own wiki-like interface to Foldoc for now and will not join our project at this point. But he is happy to have us use his material. --AxelBoldt

Axel - thanks for the literate programming article - an area I'm starting to explore. I think just a couple of hours passed between my requesting the article and your contribution. --Claudine

Axel - could you have a look at Functional analysis? It's so incomprehensible (and I did some second and third-year college mathematics, though I'm certainly no expert) that I'm just about wondering whether it's actual mathematics or just some pseudoscience somebody's deliberately slipped into Wikipedia to test whether it would be detected . . . and even if it's not, it could use some serious revision to be comprehensible (at least at a hand-waving level if not at a technical level) by lesser mortals --Robert Merkel

Cool, you've just done so. It's now at least semi-readable . . .

Axel - You are spot on with the big mess over in tensors. It *is* a very messy topic because of the large amount of baggage in train. Hopefully, someone such as yourself can dig into the math part and make it slightly more accessible. Others (maybe me) can handle the engineering side of it. And by the way, one very well-respected, though now dated, continuum mechanics simply states a matrix is a tensor if it changes coordinates the way tensors are supposed to. I might add that this text is in current use as an entry level graduate text at berkeley civil eng. this semester... =) In its favor, the author uses 3 different notations in the book: indicial, index free, and gibbs dyadic (whoa!).

Axel - I've added a few examples to WikiProject Concepts. I'd be interested in knowing what you think about it, as a mathematician. Do you believe that it can help structure the encyclopedia? --Seb

Seb: frankly, I don't see the point of the wpc hierarchy. Every well-written encyclopedia article about a concept should include generalizations and specializations anyway, and most math articles do already. So you are basically building a concept hierarchy parallel to the one of Wikipedia, except yours has a more formalized format and less information. --AxelBoldt

Axel - So what you're saying, basically, is that you don't see how having access to a well-defined structure might make navigation or edition easier? --Seb

In fact, it may make navigation more difficult. Suppose someone wants to find out about formal languages. They type it into the search box, and two articles show up: Wikipedia's and Wpc's. Which one to pick? If they pick Wpc's, they learn that a formal language is a kind of set, involves strings, read the definition and learn about several kinds of formal languages. The same information, and much more, is also contained in Wikipedia's article. So how does Wpc help? I think it would be more useful to make sure that all Wikipedia articles about concepts correctly link to their generalizations and specializations. --AxelBoldt

Good edits on the GNU Free Documentation License page. --TheCunctator

Would you write a stub for space-time ? (It's more than a graph of motion space vs. time.)~ BF

good work with the de-messing up of theory of relativity--AN

Hey Axel, I really like your work, even (or especially!) when you clean up behind a mistake I made. Thanks! --Dmerrill

Axel, it seems to me a relative prime would be a better title than relatively prime. --Dmerrill

No, because "relatively prime" is an adjective, there is no such thing as a prime that is "relative". --AxelBoldt

Hey Axel... I see a tesseract article. Are there fifth dimensional objects too? Add one if you wish. We need to teach Larry there are more than 3 D's. ~BF

Sure there are fifth dimensional objects. There are also infinite dimensional objects. Every little electron in your body is described by an infinite dimensional object. There's also not just one infinity. There is a hierarchy of infinitely many different infinitudes. You can quote me on New Age :-) --AxelBoldt

--- Re "Spinoza": You wrote "redirect saves one click".

REDIRECT is only smart when we're sure there aren't any other "Spinozas" (or whatever) that people might be looking for. I'm not sure.

AxelBoldt, your web site is remarkably interesting. Please add entries on Linux Bliss and the Hitler/Vatican Konkordat to the Wikipedia.

Hello Axel, in re: your question about Leni Riefenstahl: yes, she did take pictures, and also take some footage, but she's expressed dissatisfaction with the footage and not released it to the public. Riefenstahl discusses it in The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, which is a long but clever and fascinating documentary about just what it sounds as if it would be about. She did publish some of the photos in a book. --Koyaanis Qatsi

Dr. Bolt I went to your .de homepage. Isla Vista is nice isn't it ? I have a question. Hypothetically speaking, if we raised c to the c power c |c| would we have a number expressing light accelerating at light speed ? BF

No we wouldn't. Something "accelerating at light speed" doesn't make sense: speed has the units meters per second (or miles per hour), while acceleration has the units meters per second per second or miles per hour per hour: it tells you how much the speed changes per hour.

Yes, Isla Vista is fun. I particularly miss the drunken Mexicans who would give me a ride home to downtown SB late at night when I had missed the last bus. --AxelBoldt

Axel: a request. I can't really put this under Requested articles because I don't exactly know what I'm requesting :). In one of Feynman's books he writes about learning how to 'differentiate parameters under the integral sign', or something similar. You couldn't write an article on procedure for this if you've got any spare time.

Many thanks -- sodium.

Google search on knowledge quotations led to this page: http://home.earthlink.net/~anewhaus/Aphorknowledge.htm .

The actual, full quotation is:

Desire to know why, and how, curiosity; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.
Leviathan, Part I, Chapter VI

--TheCunctator

Thanx for the "idiotic edits" smart man...

Well we need to put some order under computer science then. We got a non hierarchical list there, but in definitions seems that complexity theory is a subfield of theory of computation which is a subfield of computer science... Huh? Please answer back here without deleting it, possibly.

(I know it's hard 4 ya, but at least, try, thnx)

--little guru

I agree that computer science is a mess. If you want to clean it up, be my guest. Sorry for "idiotic", but it was deserved. --AxelBoldt

Dr. Bolt, are you familiar at all with http://www.stardrive.org Jack Sarfatti's physics work ? I'm on his scientific mailing list.. don't ask me how. And he uses math symbols and equations in the emails. He seems to have a prestigious group of cronies, since he was a student of Feynman in the 70's. ~BF

Hi Axel. I'm using Opera 6.0 for Windows, and neither of your bookmarklets are working for me. :( --STG

Does it do Javascript at all? Try making a bookmark with url 

  javascript:alert('hello STG');

If that works, we can work from there :-) --AxelBoldt

Works fine, but only if I remove the final semi-colon. --STG

Oh, that may already be the thing. Can you go on irc, on the #wikipedia channel on irc.openprojects.net? I think we'll figure it out faster that way. --AxelBoldt

Well, obviously I couldn't last night. :) I tried dropping the final semi-colons from both the Netscape and IE versions; no dice. I can probably IRC tonight. I'm in the Atlantic timezone (one hour behind Eastern). --STG

Or maybe not. Probably the most direct thing to do would be to install Opera yourself so you could see what's up. However, I that's a bit of a hassle for you. Maybe there's an Opera-using, Javascript-savvy Wikipedian around... --STG

Ok, I have an Opera version of the bookmarklet on http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/bookmarklet.html. It doesn't do the selection thing since Opera doesn't seem to support the relevant Javascript method, but you can still type or paste in Wikipedia search terms and you'll get a new window with the results. --AxelBoldt

It works great. Does Javascript have a method to grab the contents of the clipboard? If so, it would be possible to highlight the term, hit CTRL-C, then hit the bookmarklet. --STG

It's always a matter of which methods the browser exports to javascript. Javascript itself doesn't have any way to access the clipboard, or the selection, or a window. It's all provided by the browser, and different browsers provide different things. I doubt that Opera provides access to the clipboard, since access to the selection is more direct and not included in Opera. --AxelBoldt

Hi Axel, I find some of the articles you have written or contributed to ver y interesting. Unfortunately, I cannot understand them -- specifically, in the article on Goedel's theorum, and a linked article on a consistent and complete system of arithmatic, I do not understand

? x : ? (0 = x + 1)

and what follows. I am neither a philosopher nor a mathematician, but would like to read articles on these topics. If there is an article in Wikipedia on how to read this system of notation (including a box which I don't think copied in this cut and paste), could you insert links to it in these articles? If there isn't such an article, perhaps you or someone else could write one? I am sure others would be as grateful as I -- SR

I'm not sure about what you don't understand; since you referred to a box, that may mean that a certain mathematical symbol didn't render correctly in your browser, and then of course everything that follows will be incomprehensible as well. But the Goedel article Goedels Incompleteness Theorem doesn't have any symbols. So let me know what specifically is unclear in that article.


Presburger arithmetic and First-order predicate calculus have indeed several symbols that some browsers don't understand: the quantifiers. The "for all" quantifier looks like an A on its head, and the "exists" quantifier looks like a mirror E. They are valid HTML 4.0 symbols, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean much. If you look at the source of the page, you should be able to figure out what the equations mean. --AxelBoldt

you were right -- thanks -- SR

FYI, the Netscape bookmark works great in Mozilla 0.9.6 on Windows. I'll test Moz 0.9.7 on Linux tonight at home. --Dmerrill

Great, I added that information to the page http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/bookmarklet.html --AxelBoldt

Axel...thought you were going to help us out over at Vietnam War!  ;) F. Lee Horn

Hi Axel. I've seen you're list of contributions and I'm very impressed. --Georg Muntingh


Hi Axel, I was thinking of emailing you this, but maybe this is a better place. Do you have a list of good books that really allows one to understand many topics in CS? For example, reading SICP, it is clear that I can't predict things. I know a bit about computers to the gate level, so it was not hard to understand Knuth's TAOCP. But with different computational models like lambda calculus, I have little idea of what is underneath.

Are there any such books I can read? I am not near an English-speaking university (I'm in Germany) but I can order books. I don't even mind if they're things like Spivak's calculus, if analysis is important to the field.

Thanks for any help, Tj

If you have read and understood Knuth's books, then you know more algorithms than most computer scientists. So if you are mainly interested in the theoretical concepts now, I'd recommend Hopcroft and Ullman, Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Every university has that book. There is a German translation too, but I think it is buggy. --AxelBoldt

Hello Axel, please see talk:Goedels ontological proof for a justification of the see-also to Absolute Infinite (which should, and will, have an article) - also please ignore my intemperate comment on one of the edits - I am a great admirer of your excellent contributions on this and other subjects. -- The Anome

Hello Axel. I would like to commend your contributions herein this Free Encyclopedia. I was looking for this kind of stuff all over and I think that finally I have found. I've done a lot of same things as you have and I have decided to put my works here. -- XJamRastafire

Well, that's great. Welcome aboard! AxelBoldt

Axel, I did not replace sex education with a completely differet article. If you'll take the time to read it, you will see that it is indeed incremental.

Please do not revert someone's changes simply because you disagree. Follow SR's example and your own advice, and make incremental changes.

--Ed Poor

I did read the article. For example, why did you remove the definition of "sex education" in the first sentence and replace it with your nonsensical "Sex education is a controversial issue in public education"? Wouldn't it make sense to tell people first what sex education is? Obviously, you hadn't even looked at the definition, you simply pasted in your version. AxelBoldt

No, I am the originator of the article and was putting back what someone else had taken out. I know you and I are on opposite polar sides on marriage and other issues, but I'm convinced if we both agree to adhere to NPOV guidelines, we can contribute value to the Wikipedia. Ed Poor

Hi Axel, thanks for your time on my old pages. You probably noticed that i already listed them on "wikipedia pages to be deleted", but thanks anyway :) szopen

Hi Axel, I will try to be diplomatic and respectful of others, but I have a concern with regard to contributing to an encyclopedia where someone like Ed Poor continues to inject articles with his own judgements. His pages written from NPOV are hardly that. I have no problem with describing a subject and that linking from the subject commentaries on it pro or against, but I do have a problem with the main article being littered with judgements one way or the other. One need not pass judgements on homosexuals, sex education, etc to write out what the topic is. I also think that it is completely appropriate to provide a link to a commentary regarding the topic in question. Is this too much to ask for? I realize that I have just started to contribute and I very much like the idea of wikipedia, but I don't want to continue if this is to be turned into a forum for someone or some group trying to push their own agenda.

If you find an article which tries to push a particular point of view, just go in and edit it, clarifying that such and such is a point of view typically held by such and such group, and also explain the view of the others. This can work pretty well, check out for example abortion and scientology.
The most important thing is to be bold; if you honestly believe that your change improves the article, then make it, don't shy away because you are too modest to modify somebody else's writings. AxelBoldt

Good catch on gay-bashing. I gather if the assailant is unaware of or unconcerned with the sexual orientation of a homosexual victim, then the term does not apply. Ed Poor

Yeah, I like the page too - and it prompts me to ask you for a specific review

While "intellectual property rights" may not exist, "intellectual property law" sure does and so does "intellectual capital" - sort of. I would like a strict Randroid, a strict Stallmanite, and Baruch Lev himself to have a look at "intellectual capital" and see what else could or should be said.

My approach was to put the non-controversial notions of instructional capital (it's pretty clear atht instructions to do something are a means of production or protection) and individual capital (it's pretty clear that creativity produces something even if we can't say what), but the simplistic models that try to explain *HOW* they fit together seem to be increasingly messy.

If we can focus the controversy into the "intellectual capital" article then we can have relatively stable articles on the way instructions produce value, or individuals (separate from their instructions or intellectual process) contribute value. Which are micro-economic.

Alex, feel free to use my Wiki and recommend others to your "Wikipedia Discussion" page to cover downtime. It's a little late now, but it did seem like a good idea... --LDC

... and I should really put it on the Wikipediholic page. "I'm not a Wikipediholic, but if I'm cut off for half a day, I scramble to organize fellow Wikipedians on some other wiki." AxelBoldt

Alex, nothing personal, but I feel that certain redirects and changes have been ideologically motivated, whether you're aware of it or not, and raised the issue of 'ideological vandalism' on Talk:Vandalism In Progress

The word "vandalism" is unfortunate but as I understand it here it refers to all violations of Wiki meta guidelines.

We might want to discuss, here, what you believe about "intellectual property law", "viral licenses", "cognitive science of mathematics", as I believe you have some objections to these generalizations of more specific concepts like copyright/patent/trademark, copyleft, and 'mathematics as product of mind' respectively. You are far from the only persons who wants to keep these ideas in a neat clean box, but so far you are the only one stomping articles that offend your sense of them. I'd rather know what you believe about them so that we may come to some agreement and I can point you to the sources that I seem to think are well-known that you seem to think are unique or obscure.

Well, you are mistaken about a lot of things. First, I did not touch your intellectual property law article. Second, your viral license article was crap, and instead of fixing it, I redirected to a much better discussion of the topic, and pointed out its crappiness in Talk:. I happen to be a fan of viral licenses and have used them for many of my software projects; right now I'm contributing to this php wiki script which is GPL. Regarding philosophy of mathematics: your pet theory, while interesting, is just one of many, certainly not a majority position, and should be presented accordingly. Personally, I'm a Platonist, but fall back to formalism (Curryism) when challenged, because it is the easiest position to defend. I am convinced that any intelligence, whether embodied or not, whether in this universe or elsewhere, will always by necessity arrive at the number pi, the monster group, the normal distribution, the prime number theorem etc. Most working mathematicians believe the same. But working mathematicians have nothing of substance to say about the philosophy of mathematics, just like cooks should shut up when it comes to restaurant criticism. So I haven't written a word about philosophy of math yet. And finally regarding your accusations of bias in September 11 articles: you have shown your own blatant biases by scare quoting "terrorist", as if there were a serious debate about the terroristic qualities of the attacks. AxelBoldt
While I don't particularly take them seriously either, it happens that 24's "pet" theories actually do have a small following among a few serious academics. But then, there are still people who read Social Text and take it seriously too. I agree that we should avoid cluttering most of the rank-and-file articles on math with these ideas, but we probably should mention them in articles like "philosophy of mathematics" and "body philosopher" and "George Lakoff", etc. Just as we mention creationism in the main "evolution" articles, but not in every biology article. --LDC
Agreed, "most" articles should not mention philosophy of mathematics concerns at all. Extremely fundamental things like Euler's Identity, pi, monster group, etc., should mention specific issues raised and provide links, but not spend more than a paragraph on it. There are maybe a dozen such articles.
I didn't *write* an intellectual property law article, and if it was not Axel (maybe it was LDC) who broke down the intellectual property law link inappropriately into three separate links to copyright, patent, and trademark, then I apologize.
OK, I have some sense of Axel now. Let me try to equalize by responding and laying out my own weird ideas for you both, so you know what's "pet". I am not a Platonist except insofar as the cognitive systems of animals have common fractal geometry (which Turing studied in detail and tried to put limits on, especially neuron growth). I dont shift positions to one that is easier to defend when I am challenged - I let myself be argued against on the same grounds I have promoted/established. I therefore lose more, and learn more. The rest of this is strictly to Axel:
You're entitled to your belief that pi, monster group, normal distribution, prime number theorem, e, and (most controversially) i are divinely determined or just built into the universe or all universes or whatever.
You cannot even quote me properly. I do not hold any of those beliefs. AxelBoldt
Many friends of mine share them. But it has always been a key question in the philosophy of math whether or which of these basic ideas arises from a desire of humans for some convenient simple notation that doesn't violate their immediate constraints... F=MA is also convenient, but under certain constraints, wrong. I tend to look at math more like physics and expect that "i" in particular will be shown to be a notational convenience at some point. But that's idiosyncratic - I don't even know what George Lakoff thinks of it, I don't mention it, and I make no claim that it has anything to do with the longstanding claim of indigenous peoples that colonists simply look at the applicability of mathematics a different way.
Santa Fe Institute and many others are my source for significance of Euler's Identity, which when I found it was titled "the most remarkable formula in the world" and didn't mention the basic operations that the formula includes, only the constants, as if hte operations were somehow above creating the remarkability... I left it much more neutral than I found it, and will eventually satisfy you that Euler's Identity is central to any cognitive science of mathematics, or to proving that one cannot be made to exist.
Re: politics.
The debate is on the use of the word "terrorist" to mean anything at all. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) categorically refuses to use it,
Google search for "site:bbc.co.uk terrorist" give 8410 hits. AxelBoldt
the BBC was always willing to quote people accusing each other of being "Terrorists", but as I understand their on-air policy, they won't let their anchors or staff journalists use that word except when reporting someone else's opinion, or clearly in context of some other party's definition. Anyway to see what they think officially, see

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1693000/1693876.stm


they do appear to have been more willing to use the word since 9/11, but also since that time there have been UN and US and EU agreements on what it means... so it's not taking a side to say that grousp claiming to hvae done things that qualify as terrorism by those definitions are "terrorists"... from the standards of the society they speak to, they are... and it isn't always denied - some groups revel in it. Which creates its own distortions. These other objections to it still stand:
if calling someone a "terrorist" makes it easier to attack their families or communities, the word may only be useful to escalate violent conflicts... and may have to be ignored by people seeking peace.
and given its subjective context and heavy overuse (would you want to see the entire Viet Nam War described as "terrorist attacks on the Vietnamese"?) I believe it must be avoided. But I covered that in the "talk" sections and also left alone your Sept.11 Terrorist Attack text, heavily biased as it was and with features that would surely trigger your wrath elsewhere (should I add a memoriam to the My Lai massacre, yesterday's casualties in Ramallah, all Native Americans killed by cholera?) - I let you encounter this yourself. Read http://indymedia.org to see a variety of different views of Sept.11th - or csmonitor.com or theguardian.co.uk if you want something from a major newspaper.
I scare quoted "terrorist" to imply that I don't believe the word has any meaning in the neutral point of view... but to respect the common usage. I would like to see this standard applied everywhere, for reasons more clearly defined in asymmetric warfare.
I accept your dislike of the viral_license article, and would have accepted any rewrite, but not the redirect, which seemed (unlike many such redirects) to not preserve the original text anywhere for there to be any debate on it.
It's preserved in the history of viral license, and I also included a link to it in my criticism on Talk:copyleft. AxelBoldt
thank you, that was considerate, and I hadn't noticed, so I apologize. Hopefully we are done not reading each other's references... I hope... ?
We seem to hold extreme and opposing points of view on "terrorist", on the underlying basis of mathematics' validity, and perhaps on pornography as well. That's interesting in itself, as I have encountered no other such stark conflicts. I am certain we can learn from each other if we adopt a joint protocol for dispute resolution... or we can simply do as we've been doing (you chopping out text and pretending topics don't exist that do, and I complain in "Talk" files and enlist political support and new writers, without any attempt to modify or update your articles on political topics) - the asymmetry may also teach us something.
I respect your intellect if not your assumptions. If nothing else, Sun Tzu applies, and I will make every effort to comprehend your point of view fully.
Warmest regards, 24

From user:DanKeshet

I don't know who to thank about the improved diff, but I find it absolutely fantabulous. I don't know how I ever lived without it. Thank you kindly. DanKeshet

You can thank me a little bit :-) and Geoffrey T. Dairiki <dairiki@dairiki.org> a lot. He wrote difflib.php for use in the excellent phpwiki, and I pulled it into our script. AxelBoldt
Thank you kindly, then! :)

Axel, I just found your comments on my talk page, and I responded to them there. -- Toby Bartels


Hi, I've been on a 0-length-article deletion binge over the past couple of days, and some of the only ones left are old user pages that I didn't want to get rid of without asking the owners first. Can I delete AxelBoldt/Searchscripttest, AxelBoldt/Test? I'm on the verge of getting the "stub articles" page to be actually useful, and getting these off of the list would help. Bryan Derksen, Sunday, April 21, 2002

Thanks for doing that. Sure, all subpages of AxelBoldt can be junked. I'll do it right now. AxelBoldt

I've another question for you on Talk:Depth of field, Axel. Koyaanis Qatsi

Axel, thank you not only for your positive feedback, but also for frequent factual and stylistic polishing of my contributions. --Bolek Bobcik

I responded to your question about what I've been doing to the "complete list" articles over on my own usertalk. Bryan Derksen

Hey, Axel, I just made the discussed change to Locally_compact, as well as adding a bunch of new stuff. No, don't bother to look — it's not there. My question to you is, if my browser crashes while I've been editing an article, and I successfully pressed Preview a bunch of times (but never pressed Submit, successfully or no), is there any way to retrieve that text? (Answer here or in my User_Talk:. — Toby Bartels, Tuesday, June 11, 2002

It is gone. I edit my (longer) articles in a text editor and always keep a local copy of everything. That way, one also has access to spell-checking, search-and-replace etc. AxelBoldt, Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Axel, in global warming talk I wrote:

Great job! Now the article flows in one continuous narrative, like something from Time magazine. I couldn't have done it better myself . . .

I stand by that compliment. Creating a continuous narrative is not something I'm good at (I'm still learning how to write a single paragraph that sticks together).


After reading your version and pondering it (through several cycles of read and ponder), I began to have some ideas of improving the opening paragraphs.

I still think we can help improve the article by editing each other's work. You will be better than I am at certain aspects of editing, and you will contribute ideas or knowledge that I do not have. I hope to return the favor, with your consent.

Ed Poor, Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Important note for all sysops: There is a bug in the administrative move feature that truncates the moved history and changes the edit times. Please do not use this feature until this bug is fixed. More information can be found in the talk of Brion VIBBER and maveric149. Thank you. --maveric149

Thanks for the clarification on Ohm's Law. Vicki Rosenzweig

Hey Axel, Do you have developer access? I was in Portland, got the email requesting a password change, complied & logged out. That was two days ago & I can't remember my password; I'd ask Jimbo but I know he's busy like always. Anyway, if you do, could you just reset it to something random and email my nupedia address? I tried to send a msg from the account but it just said the page was loading forever, and it never went through. Cheers, KQ

Eh, never mind, I've just sent Jimbo an email about it. Best, KQ

Axel, I made several changes to global warming and greenhouse gas. Please review these changes, vetting them both for NPOV and scientific acceptability. --Ed Poor 06:21 Jul 30, 2002 (PDT)

Ed, note that Axel is on vacation until August 11. I looked at these a little myself, but I'm a poor substitute for Axel. — Toby 11:39 Jul 30, 2002 (PDT)


Axel, when you get back, can you look at the new and improved Separation axiom? This is a completely redesigned version of the former Separation axioms, which means that your edits to the original have been lost as such, although I hope that your lessons have been incorporated. The intent behind the change is at Talk:Separation axioms. Other new pages growing out of this change are Kolmogorov space, the stub Preregular space, and the currently unwritten History of the separation axioms. (Also don't forget Ed's note above.) — Toby 01:39 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)

I like the new Separation axiom page. I think it's good to separate out the historical morass from our adopted definitions and to present the axioms in increasing order of strength. The graphic looks a bit crappy though; maybe you can use anti-aliasing for the fonts? AxelBoldt

O, is that what that's for? Let me try it ... No, the resulting GIFs look completely identical to me. If you know more about converting images well than I do, then I'd be happy to email you a PostScript file (or even a TeX source). — Toby 02:42 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)

Hey Axel, both "referred" and "refered" are correct, and Wikipeodia ;-) doesn't have a preference for US or UK spelling (just FYI...  :-) -- Marj Tiefert 09:32 Aug 11, 2002 (PDT)

Bast! I didn't know there was a diference for that word and have "corrected" this many times myself to the "rr" spelling. BTW welcome back Axel! --mav

Hi everybody. My Oxford dictionary, which presumably lists both British and American spellings, doesn't give "refered", and, more importantly, neither does American_and_British_English_Differences. Marj, do you have a reference? AxelBoldt

My mistake - English just isn't consistent! referred is right, but both referable and referrable are right, as is reference of course! -- Marj Tiefert 19:54 Aug 11, 2002 (PDT)

Google - search for 'refered' (139,000 results); search for 'referred' (8,750,000 results). Nuff said.Mintguy


If we went by Google, we'd use "it's" for the possessive... Fowler says "referred". mea culpa on one of the "seperate" you fixed... ouch... -- Tarquin 16:04 Aug 11, 2002 (PDT)

I haven't seen a dictionary that, given a correct spelling, lists common incorrect spellings for the word, but such a dictionary can be manually simulated by performing Google searches (or indeed, using any other Web searching service). The Web is made up of yahoos (citation: http://www.yahoo.com). P.S.: This incorrect spelling is also enshrined on the Internet in the server environment variable HTTP_REFERER. That doesn't make it right either. David 16:27 Aug 11, 2002 (PDT)

If there's some suggestion that the spelling with one R is British, I can assure you it's not the case; I'm English, and all of my dictionaries only give a spelling with 2 Rs (maybe I don't have enough dictionaries, I don't know). We normally ADD extra letters, you know, not take them out. --Camembert
How about making all these spelling corrections minor edits?Ortolan88

A question for you: any idea if in another english speaking country the decimal comma is used instead of a decimal point? How about in Europe in general? I ask because in the article hipparchus they write a formula with a 2,5 meaning 2.5. I know in some places that would be correct, but this is supposed to be english. But I don't know if it is a language or country thing. Probably decimal point deserves an article.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:AxelBoldt/Archive_December_2004_-_December_2006&oldid=163085"