User:Patrick0Moran/Archive1

Hello. When you create a new page, could you use complete sentences and highlight the title word or title phrase at its first appearance? Thanks. Michael Hardy 00:12 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Greetings! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you have questions or doubts of any sort, do not hesitate to post them on the Village Pump, somebody will respond ASAP. Other helpful pages include:

Have fun! --Jiang 00:29 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Spam? Huh? See my reply on the village pump. -- Wapcaplet 16:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Wapcaplet, spamming? Perish the thought! -Smack 01:52, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

What is the recommended approach/remedy when somebody sends you "talk"/e-mail about their great T-shirts they have fore sale? Spam within this system is even more annoying (if possible) than spam to my regular e-mail address. I assume there must be a process for protesting against the activity of somebody who sends such junk. Patrick0Moran 06:46, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Has this ever actually happened? Your user talk: page doesn't show anything of the sort. Spam depends on high volume. A single message targeted at a single person is vanishingly unlikely to get any response. It's just so much easier to send real email in bulk. -Smack 06:50, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

According to my talk page, Patrick0Moran apparently believes I am the source of this spam he refers to. I have not, nor will I ever, sent spam, either in email or talk form, to anyone, least of all anyone on Wikipedia, and least of all about T-shirts which I don't even possess. Could you please show us where this has occurred, Patrick? I'm interested to know who is impersonating me. -- Wapcaplet 16:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I assume that </table> is what he is talking about... If you usually remember to sign your posts, and often post on talk: pages, there would be a link to an "advertisment" posted on many talk pages. I'm not sure about the e-mail part, watchlists, where you get an e-mail if the page changes, haven't been implemented, have they? (In writing this, I just noticed a quote from myself in your user page history - apparently I'm famous already...) Ксип Cyp 17:53, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A search of the user talk: namespace for 't-shirt' revealed no spam. On the other hand, it also did not detect the table that Cyp just posted, so I don't know if it's meaningful at all. -Smack 01:57, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

That's because the search is currently running off a static copy of the database, so it won't show anthing that was added in the last couple of days. Angela 02:00, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

What I posted was from User:Wapcaplet, not from the User talk namespace. Ксип Cyp 10:05, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I thing that appears in the box above appeared when I clicked on "you have messages" one time. I didn't go to Wacaplet's user-talk, unless there was a link somehow hooked in with "you have messages." I read it too fast and thought it meant real T-shirts, but even so I prefer to go to the "classified ads" in my newspaper or go to the yellow pages, rather than getting, e.g., (it really happened) a phone call from the local mortuary suggesting... Well, you get the idea. I'm not sure how this happened. I can't see any indication of the message being edited out of my stuff, but I can't find it. I apologize to Wapcaplet for getting his name/identity involved in this publicly. I wrote to the "well" because I looked around for a link for some kind of FAQ on how to handle "unrequested commercial solicitations" and the link.

Patrick0Moran 17:31, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

No hard feelings :-) -- Wapcaplet 03:53, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Glad to see this sorted. :) Martin 10:05, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You beat me! I don't know if there is any technical term for trot in Chinese. wshun 20:00, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Your entry on Horse breaking seems more of an essay on the topic - whether the practice is good or not. For the wikipedia, it should be a description of the thing from a neutral point of view. --Zippy 08:18, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't have chosen to use the term "horse breaking" because it is not NPOV itself. It assumes the use of violence in the initial training of horses. You can't break an egg without breaking it. I have tried to add enough not best practices without calling them stupid and counterproductive to balance the issue by showing the whole range of techniques that can be used in what is colloquially and frequently inaccurately called "horse breaking."

Does the Chinese char -> Unicode method described by User:kt2 fromerly on his user page work -- here (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Ktsquare&oldid=1348456) -- for you? --Menchi 05:20, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Another method: Enter the characters at http://www.ask.com/ , and the next screen will reveal their codes. It doesn't work with a string over 10 char though, I think. --Menchi 05:27, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Replied on User talk:Menchi#Chinese character input problem. --Menchi 01:49, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

This works great on my 'puter: [http://code.cside.com/3rdpage/us/unicode/converter.html Character Codes in HTML Unicode convertor]. --Menchi 01:26, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

What was wrong with the material you took out of Gender role? RickK 02:12, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It was my stuff that somebody objected to, so I decided to remove it and then go over the things that I saw as problematical, one by one.

Patrick0Moran 02:21, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I thought it was good stuff. Too bad. RickK 02:25, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I'm not trying to deny the value of the work, if it has value. I've found the disagreements about sex and related subjects difficult to pursue for some reason. Securing clarity is not easy because the subject is so complex and everything seems to have been done without much top-down planning.

Thanks for the kind words.

Patrick0Moran 02:47, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

thanks. The kung fu page seems to need a lot work. Even the martial arts page covers kung fu better.

Xah P0lyglut 10:03, 2003 Nov 30 (UTC)

I appreciate the explanation on my talk page. However, you should know that the convention of breaking up the page in the way you discuss is usually used for articles (although there is even a limit at which an article must for practical reasons be broken up). The convention for talk pages is to periodically archive material. I don't believe any one very considers it tantamount to deletion or vandalism, it is simply a way of managing what is in effect an endlessly ongoing conversation. Slrubenstein

The fact that a "convention", as you call it, is usually used for articles does not prevent its being used to improve the readability of talk pages. P0M

The trouble with archiving a talk page at a crucial point is that continuity of discussion is lost. In particular, if an objection had been raised that somebody did not wish to respond to, archiving the discussion at that point would have the advantage, for the person who would find the objection difficult to answer, that things that are "out of sight [go] out of mind." I do not intend to accuse you of deliberately obscuring a line of questioning, but I was miffed to discover that I would have to copy things from the archive to the current talk page to make them "reappear" -- and that even then they would probably draw somebody's ire for being taken out of context. P0M 09:17, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Dear Patrick, I'm very sorry about that! I'm using Mozilla so I can use IRC chat at thesame time, and it's an old version that has some weird bugs when I use cut and paste or even typeover. Also, I didn't check the edit history before I came here to leave this message, so it's possible that EntmootOfTrolls (alias Ann) deleted them when "she" deleted Slrubenstein's comments. But it was probably me (completely inadvertently) and I'm truly sorry. Thanks, BCorr € Брайен 05:04, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No problem. I was wrong to screech at you without communicating privately first. I think I am getting a little shell-shocked. Too many things are changing after an eternity of trying to get a single point straightened out. P0M

Thanks -- and not to worry. It was just bad luck for me to have that happen after EoT decided to drop in. It so hard to figure out what's going on when things are already stressful. Cheers, BCorr € Брайен 14:27, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For part of an explanation I'm working on, I'm trying to get a short list of beneficial human mutations. The mutation that created "white" skin is one. The mutation that improved our ability to make speech sounds is another one. If I need to fill things out with non-beneficial but readily apparent, I know of two more, blue skin and red hair. Any others you can think of? Thanks. P0M 00:51, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)~

Two obvious ones are the "sickle cell" mutation which, while not beneficial in itself, provides resistance against malaria, and a common mutation in the CCR4 gene which offers resistance against HIV. Stewart Adcock 01:25, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[Peak:] Stewart - Isn't that CCR5? See e.g. http://www.broad.mit.edu/mpg/popgen/pubs/1998_AJHG_CCR5.pdf Peak 07:36, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[Peak:] Patrick - Careful!

First - "beneficial" in biology is usually relative to environment. Thus the sickle-cell mutation confers a net benefit in some environments, but not in others. In cases where there are significant numbers of subpopulations with different alleles, it is safe to assume that differenct variations are either neutral or ambiguous with respect to benefits. That is, since there are fairly large numbers of people with the various eye colors, we can be sure that no one eye color is "uniformly beneficial".

Second - almost all the "universally beneficial" mutations that any one subpopulation of H. sapiens has today are in fact universal to the species. That is, universally beneficial mutations that occurred since the emergence of H. sapiens are extremely rare. This is basically because H. sapiens is of such recent origin and has for the most part maintained a gene flow, with the result that most of the genetic variability amongst extant H. sapiens is either "invisible" or associated with detrimental changes.

Putting it rather crudely:

H. sapiens ~= common ancestor with chimps + beneficial mutations

There seems to be a nice little paradox here: although beneficial mutations are very rare, we are the sum of a set of such mutations.Peak 07:36, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[P0M:] I am trying to find a clear and convincing example to explain why “all beneficial mutations are in fact universal to the species.” There has to be a reason why some people are so stuck on the idea of “race,” and I suspect that it is due to their inability to see how a grandchild can inherit traits from all four grandparents. (And, of course, if that is possible then a more gradual mixing of genetic components could occur.) “How can a good caucasian of blue blood stock end up with shovel-shaped incisors?!?”

[P0M:] Consider a situation in which A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H are alleles, i, j,...p are alleles, and so forth. The primed elements in the following schematic representation are beneficial mutations. The pairs of columns are chromosomes, and only four genes of interest are included in these imaginary chromosomes:

Adam      Beth    Calvin        Delores

A’  B     C  D     E  F         G   H’
i   j’    k  l     m n’         o   p
Q   R     S’ T     U V          W’ X
y   z     a  b’    c’ d         e   f

[P0M:] If some people believe that only the chromosomes as pictured above could be inherited, then they would have trouble to believe in a grandchild, or anybody farther down the line, called

Ida
A’ H’
j’  n’
S’ W’
b’  c’

[P0M:] Instead, if V (or some other gene on the same first-level chromosome) codes for violet eyes, then those people would expect to find n’ (improved oxygen absorption adaptation for high altitudes, for instance) only in people with violet eyes. And if R codes for vivid red hair, they would expect to find j’ (improved sound articulation adaptations facilitating human speech) only in people with red hair. Finding both improved oxygen absorption and improved speech production in people with neither violet eyes nor red hair would seem contrary to reason, perhaps. I know it’s a contrived example, which is why I’d like to find some instance of a beneficial mutation (or even something like the sickle-cell trait, although for vividness I’d prefer something that could be determined more readily) together with two “marker” characteristics on the "same" chromosome. P0M 02:37, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

== Wikipedia T-Shirts ==

I've made some Wikipedia T-shirt designs. Check out my meta user page for designs which you are free to use for any purpose you like.

Mandarin Chinese

As you can see, I've moved most of the text taken from Mandarin to the Chinese language article. I left Scratch_pad#Adoption of Foreign Words there because it's Mandarin focused. I think this could be made into a full-fledged article, with examples from other dialects/variations added. What do you think? --Jia ng 05:02, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Jiang. Yes. I think it would make thinks much less abstract. I would be interested, myself, to see some telling examples. The Min languages look much more interesting to me now that I see how they related to all the others. I know a smattering of Taiwanese and even less Fu2 Zhou1 language, but enough to believe Fu2 Zhou1 speakers who told me that when they came to Taiwan they did not just "pick up" Taiwanese in a few weeks. On the other hand Yun-nan hua sounded incomprehensible to me until somebody explained a sentence word by word and then I realized that I could catch on to it very easily. People need to see that kind of thing. If Si-chuan hua is a "dialect" and Taiwanese is a "dialect" it makes it seem that they are equally distant from "standard" Chinese. P0M

I appreciate your lengthy comments on my talk page. Did you see the comment I directed to you, on the Race talk page? I only added it yesterday, and it is embedded to respond directly to your question about what I mean by "principle." It is the only and best response I can give you (sorry that it is so late, I have been out of town). I will also look at the page on classification, and other things you have asked me about, but I am swamped at work and don't think I can get to it soon. Slrubenstein

Thanks for the note on my page. To tell you the truth, I am about to loose patience. However, I just don't have the energy to get angry -- as long as the article page is protected. Alas, that also means no one else can improve the article in legitimate ways. Anyway, I'm content to leave it to you to try to talk sense into 195, and best of luck, Slrubenstein

P0M: Slrubenstein: Be sure to make a bookmark for me.

Hi, on your language tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/9/92/Chinese_language_tree.png) you put Ba Shu, Jiao Zhou and Guan Dong as subfamilies of Qin, but from the page you cited [1] (http://www.chinesedc.com/4WenYi/Language/sino-tibetan1.htm) it looks like only Qin Jin is descended from Qin (the others look like they're on the same level as Qin). I'm looking at the section labeled Hanyu Yanhua Tu (漢語演化圖). Is there something I'm missing? --Xiaopo's Talk 22:19, Feb 4, 2004 (UTC)

Here is what I was looking at (but in romanization)

          --Ba Shu Yu
          |
          --Jiao Zhou Yu
          |
  Qin-----|--Qin Jin Yu
          |
          --Guan Dong Yu

[P0M]To me that means that Qin differentiated into 4. It's a little hard to see since both the site I got my information from and the above diagram both used dashes and "|" symbols instead of drawing connected lines. Note that on another "limb" there is a line from Qi to Qi to Qi -- and no lines perpendicular to join, e.g., Qi to Guan Dong Yu.

Hm, yeah, that makes it clearer, thanks. One question: What do the lines from both Zhongyuanyu and Qi pointing to Min mean? Does one of them show descent and the other massive vocabulary borrowing or something? --Xiaopo's Talk 07:32, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

[P0M]: I wish I knew for sure. Unfortunately all that website seems to have is the charts. Maybe if I had time I could get the books/papers they cited (if I could read their tiny print). Vocabulary borrowing happens, sometimes. But since the underlying characters are generally what carries the meaning, and since they are in dictionaries and other such sources that would have been available to everybody, it's hard to say exactly what "borrowing" means. I can think of one example. The word for "garbage" is pronounced two ways. People who are educated in Taiwan are taught to say "le4 se4" and people who are educated on the mainland are taught to say "la4 ji2". They are written with the same characters. Who is right? Well, if you go back through the history of the thing, the term comes from a non-Mandarin language where the pronunciation is neither of the above. The term means the muck that settles out in the bottom of an irrigation canal. It became extended to mean "garbage". It was carried out of its original area, probably in written form, and people looked at the characters and made their own decisions on what the "correct" pronunciations should be.

[P0M]: Before I started working on the "dialects" article I had not realized how unusual the Min languages are. In an area only slightly larger than Fujian and Taiwan there are five languages. It appears to be the only region in China where there is that much diversity. Maybe the reason is that there was at one time heavy immigration to that area that mixed Zhongyuan yu and Qi yu, and then people or ways of speaking sort of sorted themselves out. Why do both NYC and London have several dialects? Is there a kind of "linguistic nationalism" that is bolstered by or that bolsters class or ethnic differences? It's a fascinating question, but I am way over my head. I just tried to reproduce as accurately as I could the materials I could find in Chinese with the hope that somebody would come along (maybe some of those same linguists) and mop up any errors.

Please stop editing and reverting my article, thanks! :D

I did not edit and I did not revert your article -- except to remove it at this moment from my own user talk page. P0M 04:59, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

On Votes for Deletion, please clarify what page you think you created? If it's subjugating horses by force (as you mention in your comment), the page does not exist when I checked. --zandperl 04:44, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Please forgive my maladroit submission. The page name is: "Present-day proponents of subordinating horses by force", and it is still there.

Hey, just thought I'd let you know, the page you created on practical equine psychology is a copyvio from this article (http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:mdNIYpDf8PEJ:www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/Practical_equine_psychology+approaching+walk+signals+simple+acquiescence.+A+mare+will+discipline+and+reassert+her+dominance+over+a+misbehaving+foal+by+raising+her+head+and+tail,+and+moving+aggressively+toward+it.+If+it+fails+to+retreat,+she+may+make+eye+contact+as+a+further+threat,+b&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8). Just thought I'd let you know, it's been listed on "Copyvios for deletion". Yours, Meelar 05:20, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If you will kindly look at the page above, you will see that it starts out like this:

Practical equine psychology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This is a stub for Practical equine psychology. Currently, material is being moved from horse breaking that may need further editing.

Horses, unlike domestic animals like cats and dogs, have never formed a voluntary symbiotic relationship with their human keepers. Horses are prey animals, which run in herds, and have a highly developed flight instinct in order to avoid becoming food for predators. Nonetheless, because their physiology is peculiarly suited to the accomplishment of a number of human-related jobs and entertainments, humans have domesticated horses and pressed them into service for centuries.

[P0M:] They copied from the Wikipedia article and cited the article they copied from.

[P0M:] I didn't write this stuff. I moved it from another article where it was not appropriate. (I forget the details but I think somebody suggested that I not just delete it.) I actually do not agree with the article because it does not, IMHO, represent what Monty Roberts claims very accurately. But, without rereading Robert's several books I couldn't prove that the attributions are incorrect.

Wow, I apologize. It was late, if that's any help. No hard feelings? Yours, Meelar 05:55, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[P0M:] No problem. It probably needs to get wiped out anyway. I noted it long ago as needing citations, and nobody every came back to clean up their work so I assume the person who wrote it has disappeared. The original is still there, under the old article title "horse-breaking" (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Horse-breaking&oldid=256257)

zapped DNA comments

Hey Patrick, did you deliberately do this? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:DNA&diff=2709511&oldid=2709457 Stewart Adcock 18:52, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I was just coming to mention this to you :-) It was very likely an edit conflict which turned wrong :-) FirmLittleFluffyThing

Nope, and as a matter of fact I didn't even get close to the text that was zapped. And, on top of that, something else really strange happened. I wrote two paragraphs. I tried to save. There was an edit conflict. I copied my two paragraphs to clipboard. I went to my watchlist. I reentered the talk page. I saw that nothing had changed near where I had been editing. I went back to edit mode (and, unfortunately, on my Mac I have to edit the entire article because the little "edit" tags don't function. I pasted in my two paragraphs. I saved and went back to look at the revised talk page. Only one of my paragraphs appeared. I went back, hoping against hope that the missing paragraph hadn't gotten wiped out. I re-copied the two paragraphs. Fortunately they were both there. Then I went back to view the talk page and, mirabile dictu, both paragraphs were there. Then I noticed that I had mail. P0M 19:04, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I assummed it was just a mistake, but just wanted to let you know. It's all very, very strange... I am unable to edit my talk page now... Must be a DB problem. Stewart Adcock 20:55, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment on my page, yes, it is curious, isn't it? By the way, I wonder if you agree with my points about DNA: 1) I object to the language "because they propagate their traits by doing so." It is inaccurate in part because DNA doesn't exactly "do" things, and because the contribution of DNA to the propogation of traits, however significant, is not total; the propogation of traits involves other things. 2) I object to the language "It encodes the structure and functions of an organism." Technically, it does not encode the structure and functions of a cell; it encodes the structure of proteins for enzymes that are vital to the structure and function of cells and organs. I think this is a very important and too often misunderstood/oversimplified distinction that gives people a misleading view of how inherited traits work. Am I being reasonable? Slrubenstein

[P0M:] I have been trying to make my own formulation, and I think I am faced with some of the questions you raise above. The present versions seem to me to latch on to various buzz phrases -- things that may or may not be accurate but in any case do not tell the general reader anything useful. "Dogma" is an instance of what I have in mind.

[P0M:] Part of the problem in understanding DNA is that in the present it is usually found active only inside living cells -- environments that provide what it needs to do its job. At some point there must have been a form of RNA or DNA that could replicate itself simply by grabbing atoms or molecules out of the environment. That primitive situation is duplicated in the lab by introducing the enzyme DNA polymerase, which links DNA components and makes the chemical bonds of the DNA backbone, using the original DNA present as its template.

In a cell, the DNA in various segments of a chromosome can produce various chemical compounds that are useful in the body, and the entire chromosome can also reproduce itself. As long as one is looking at a single cell, one can imagine that one understands what is going on. An amoeba encounters something edible, it pulls the edible tidbit into the cell, it manufactures enzymes that disassemble the tidbit, it expels whatever it can't use and stores the rest, and then when it has enough to duplicate the chromosomes it does so, splits in half, and starts building back to a unit large enough to split. Before you know it you have a cupful of amoebas.

[P0M:] What happens when life goes multi-cellular? How does control occur? What turns one cell into a heart cell and another cell into a brain cell? There is something about the location, the environment, that will direct a stem cell deposited in the brain to make a brain cell. What is that signal? What interprets it? P0M 20:58, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[P0M:] In principle, I can understand how a template molecule duplicates itself. There has to be something about the fully assembled "target" molecule that makes it "unplug" itself from the template.

[P0M:] Lets say that the original molecule is ABCDE and it creates a "mirror" copy of itself as molecules a, b, c, d, e become available:

   c
 ABCDE
 
 a c
 ABCDE

 a cde
 ABCDE

 abcde --->  (At this point the copy begins to uncouple.)
 ABCDE

              E
          abcde 
 ABCDE

[P0M:] I can't prove that yet. P0M 07:10, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hello,

Please give your opinion here Talk:DNA/vote.

FirmLittleFluffyThing 06:05, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

(beautiful spider :-))

Hm, I certainly would feel awful if I misattributed an edit, but according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Race&diff=2747281&oldid=2673445), it was you who put in the loaded "once again" (which is what I was referring to). -- V V 09:38, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[P0M:] I think I see what happened. I was working on topic sentences and made a copy of all of them, which I then reworked so that there would be smooth flow from topic sentence to topic sentence. (I posted the proposed changes, by the way.) 195xxx had made the sentence "Lately people have tried to associate race and intelligence. This is not new." Between the time that I copied those sentences and finished by topic sentence rewrites you (or somebody else) must have discovered what 195 had done and repaired it without having him revert the change. I rather mechanically went through and fixed the topic sentences according to the draft I had posted and, in the process, replaced your edit. Sorry.

No problem, of course; these things happen. Sorry about my edit summary, then. -- V V 00:14, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

message no longer relevant! Cheers -- Tannin

Yup: it's a minefeld which has been protected numerous times. I'd like to go through and clean it up (as I did, or at least half-did, a year or two ago) but I don't like having perfectly good work constantly hacked about which, in the case of race, is an inevitability. It wouldn't actually be too difficult to make the entry read well and accurately reflect the current state of knowledge in a reasonably uncontroversial way, but it would take half a day and last for about that much longer before the lunatics and the hair-splitters ran riot over it again. Contrast this with subspecies, which I write the bulk of at the same time, and which remains readable today.

(sigh)

Still, the current version of race seems to almost completely ignore the biological meaning. Maybe we ought to redress that balance a bit. But I'mm off to the office. (Yes - and on a Sunday.) Tannin

Re: Race. Fair enough, my explanation was a bit telegraphic. The way it was phrased is that "[t]his accords with the common expression the human race, but many people continue to hold the belief that..." (my bolding); this is pretty prejudicial phrasing, wouldn't you say? This is what I meant (imprecisely, perhaps) by "sarcasm". The term subspecies inherits all the ambiguities in the term species and then some, so the preceding inference that there is "by definition" only one human race presumes too much, and, if it's going to be included at all (prob not), should be in a discussion section and not part of the definition section of the article. Alluding to the phrase the human race is also not a very scientific approach; there are lots of stock phrases in English that just don't tell you much. I think we should just stick to giving basic info in the intro and leave the supposed deductions to the parts that discuss POVs. Anyway, I'd wouldn't be surprised if the person who put that in didn't really expect/want it to stay and was just trying to make a point. -- V V 03:01, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi, sorry if I missed your earlier message. You question whether DNA acts like a "template" and instead suggest "code" insofar as it "actually functions as a as a signal for the corresponding amino acids to be brought in and strung together." I agree that this is an important function, but actually, this is precisely what "template" means to me, so I don't see the problem. I have no problem with code, DNA is certainly a code or encodes information, but the question is, what is this information used for and the answer is it is used as a template for among others things the way amino acids are strung together. My real objection is not semantic but the point that DNA does not actually do this stringing together itself, it relies on other chemicals for the actual stringing together; moreover this process you describe by itself does not determine inherited traits, other chemicals and chemical processes are involved in the inheritance of traits, that is my main point. Slrubenstein

Concerning RNA I misunderstood yes I understand you know. COncerning everything being in the ovum, perhaps, my point was simply that not everything is in the DNA itself. Slrubenstein

ad hominem

look buddy, I don't even know you, and I definately am not looking to insult you, nor belittle you, nor any of that. I made a joke, primarilly directed at the general crew of editors on on paraphilia. I am sorry if you didn't like it, perhaps it was even tacky or tasteless, but it wasn't intended as an ad hominem. Sam Spade 04:25, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

p.s. the NPOV dispute listing is full, it only is ment to hold 100 disputes or so. You can't edit it because it automatically adds when it has room. BTW, it is sam spADE not space, or was that an ad homimem ;)

[P0M:] I thought I fixed "space," sorry. Sam Spade was my radio hero as a kid and got me into a lot of trouble. I once threw a Sam Spade line to a police officer. (Groan.) But you seem to be doing the same thing with your "look buddy, I don't even know you...." Do you ever wonder how you sound to other people? P0M 05:09, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

sure, I'm a psyche major, and as a practicing hypnotist my voice will be the focus on my work. heck, as a salesman (which is what I have mainly done as far as work) I already use how I sound to other people. As far as how I am different online than in person, I admit a disadvantage of sorts, but on the other hand I spend at least as much on IM as on the wiki (often with other editors) and the fact that I met countless real-life dates from women I met via IM (I met my wife on ICQ) I think that I must present a certain degree of charm. Really, to be honest, it seems to depend on my audience. I don't click w everybody. A good friend of mine told me that I am a barometer, if someone is overly sensitive or thin-skinned, they always seem to get offended by stuff I say. I'm severely non-P.C. and asociate w alot of intellectuals and academics however, so that might be a factor as well. ;) Anyways, love me or hate me, I'm here to make/read a great, NPOV encyclopedia, and incidentilly make some friends as well. I do my best to be polite and kindly in all parts of my life, and often think "what would Jesus do?" (often before making one of my off-color jokes ;). Nice meeting you, glad to hear you likewise appreciate my present moniker, and I hope to create some brilliant prose with you in the near future. Cheers, Sam Spade 05:48, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Edits to Heteronormativity

Thanks for making the edits you have made to Heteronormativity. Your edits are well made and are insightful. I hope you continue to look over and expanded where applicable that entry. Thanks again. Lestatdelc 22:55, Apr 9, 2004 (UTC)

Sociological study

Hi, good idea -- only I don't have the time for really doing something in this direction at the moment. But I keep it in mind as a possible quite interesting field of study (an will maybe start at the German wikipedia, because there seem to be a lot more people interested in sociology (cf. de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Selbstreflexion der Wikipedia, de:Portal Soziologie). -- till we *) 08:41, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Race: Post_Tax_Day_Changes

Hi, I only wanted to make you aware of my excuse posted on the rase discussion page. Thank you for making the correction. Arnejohs 00:29, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

MSG

Patrick, I'm removing my complaint about the MSG article from my user page. The article might still strike me as a bit sensationalistic, but I really don't know enough about MSG to comment. I'm sorry if MSG has caused problems for you personally. --Ryguasu 19:52, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I am sorry if my tone on the race page seemed angry or hostile. I also apologize if I misunderstood your comment. I may have misunderstood the initial point you were making, but I was also trying to make a more general, and I believe valid and important point, concerning the writing of the article in which I was responding to some things you wrote (or, at lease, as I interpreted them) about the positions people take on race and biology. Thanks for contacting me and again I am apologize if what I wrote was rude or misplaced, Slrubenstein

Hi, I hope that I finally was able to be clear, in a non-rude way, about my points on the race page. But I m writing to ask you to do the archiving on the talk page now. I don't think anyone has been more active on the page than you, and I hesitate to archive because I do not want to archive material that is still immediately relevent to immediate need of the article. I trust your judgement, Slrubenstein

Race

POM, I think the page that could truly benefit from your dichotomy idea is the article on race. There is so much potential material to be covered there that it could use some kind of reorganization. --Rikurzhen 03:43, Jul 14, 2004 (UTC)

Hm, the McCulloch link does on its surface look off-topic to me. What do you think? I will add that paging through the external links I am disappointed at the lack of diversity in views represented, but that should probably be addressed by adding science links with other POVs. V V 22:28, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, suspicious indeed. But sure let's leave it for now. I'll look into better links in the mean time. V V 23:01, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

The race and intelligence article is a terrible mess, but I'm afraid to contribute much to it for fear that it will spark an edit war. As to why that's such as hot topic, consider this quotation "More is known about the genetics of intelligence than about any other trait, behavioral or biological". Intelligence is in a sense a stand-in for all heritable traits. Coincidently, intelligence is second only to health in how strongly people regard it, which adds to the furvor.

I find it curious that Wikipedia does not have an entry for the Haplotype map (HapMap) project. http://www.hapmap.org/ The connection to race is that individual samples will be taken from US/European, Asian, and African populations.

The HapMap, together with a series of powerful genomic tools developed over the last several years, will make it possible to spell out in great detail the genetic differences between peoples from different parts of the world.

But we already have some data on this topic: (http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/ethics.asp)

ALFRED contains allele frequency data on polymorphic loci for different human populations. As genetic polymorphisms, the common alleles at these loci must be considered normal variations. While it is a demonstrable fact that different populations have different frequencies of these alleles , most of the common alleles are present in most human populations. Many studies have shown that for any one genetic polymorphism most of the variations will occur among the individuals within each population because of the different genotypes. Only a small additional proportion of the global variation occurs as gene frequency differences among populations. Those differences, however, can illuminate evolutionary histories of human populations and may be especially relevant to design and conduct of biomedical research.

Other than the data on intelligence, I think there may be some very limited studies that demonstrate average personality differences between races. The prevelance of many genetic diseases is strongly different between populations. Cystic fibrosis for example in Europeans. A number of diseases that disproportionately affect Jewish populations have been well studied and are currently being controlled by genetic testing (e.g. Tay Sachs).

The conflict over this issue seems to stem from the normative desire for equality. You can add to this the Marxist belief that human tragedy stems from conflicts of power. Emerging genetic data provides a non-power explanation for some human differences, and thus is unwelcome. Another problem comes from the difficulty in describing exactly the kind of distinction that races entail, short of a mathematical description of allele frequency differences. --Rikurzhen

Mandarin final -r

But isn't the English /r/ retroflex as well? It certainly doesn't sound right if I leave my tongue flat.
(You know Dr. Chan?)
-- ran 10:57, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Hey! You're right. It does come from the back of the mouth (and so does English final "r"!) ... so what's the symbol for that? /ɹ^ɣ/ ?
-- ran 23:56, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

The problem with that lower-case /r/, though, is that it really means the Spanish trill. In phonemic notation they probably use it in every and any language to mean a general purpose "rhotic" consonant, but I think we should try to provide a passable phonetic description on the Mandarin page. -- ran 07:07, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

You're right about "r". I just saw something that said "..." is used? P0M

Check this source: [2] (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/American_English), para. 3. They say that 'the "er" sound of (stressed) "fur" or (unstressed) "butter", which is represented in IPA as stressed [ɝ] or unstressed [ɚ] (SAMPA [3`] and [@`]) is realized in American English as a monophthongal rhoticized vowel.' One of my charts shows that the little squiggle common to each symbol above is an indication of "rhoticity", i.e. (I guess), that the shwa is given an "r" quality. P0M 15:26, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Horses and people

I didn't really understand what you meant about horse whisperers. I dimly remember watching a documentary about a man who "gentled" horses, called The Real Horse Whisperer. It impressed me enough that I bought a book about his life and work.

The book told of his reaction (or rebellion) against his father's rough (vicious?) methods of horse breaking and how he discovered (or re-discovered) some elements of equine herd behavior. He was able to use horse's instinctual desire to be part of the herd and avoid being left out, as a motivational tool to get extraordinarily quick results. He could get an "untamed horse" to accept a human rider in under a day, often in less than an hour.

I love horses, and I'd like to see more about their nature, history, and especially their prospects of a happy life both in the wild and in partnership with human beings. (I'm also a big fan of the book Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.) --Uncle Ed 13:43, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Horses and people

Tagged image.

Hi!

I tagged your {{GFDL}}, hope you don't mind and that it was what you intended.

David Remahl 21:18, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sex article

Thank you for your suggestions about sex, especially your urging of explanation and simplification. I was away most of last week and tried to carry out your suggestions and answer your questions on the talk page. PS I just discovered your new talk page and elaborate diagrams. You put a lot of work and thinking into it. I agree with most of what you have written, but (forgive me if I am wrong) I still suspect you don't have an accurate grasp of chromosomal determinants of sex, which means that your "spectrum" or continuum from Turner to Klinefelter is at best misleading and will give people the wrong idea. E.g., where would you put penta X syndrome? Look again at the sexual differentiation article: the earliest important determinants of sex are genes from the Y chromosome, esp SRY. The sheer number of sex chromosomes has much less influence on sex than it does on height. Sex is actually simpler than height from a genetic perspective: if your Y chromosome has functional genes, and you have the autosomal genes to carry out the whole cascade of subsequent development, you will be male in every biological sense. I also wonder if you might be giving too much emphasis to fertility, which has little directly to do with being male or female (at least in the ordinary sense that one is clearly male or female by the time of puberty, before fertility is even known). Most people who are infertile did not know that in childhood and do not change sex upon discovering it as adults. However, I guess the type of gamete one produces is a legitimate level of definition of sex. Finally, perhaps I owe you one more apology because I softened some of your advocacy: I don't think the article is the place to persuade people of a specific axiological perspective on discordance. We should acknowledge the dominant Western perspective and describe it but also acknowledge that many if not most of the rest of the world does not share it. Change it again if you think the article needs to be prescriptive rather than descriptive; I won't fight over it if I can't persuade you. Regards. Alteripse 02:48, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Chinese IPA

Oy, this IPA stuff is too complicated for me. What do you think is the best way to represent in IPA the Chinese "short i" sound, i.e. the i in "Laozi" or "chi fan le ma"? - Nat Kraus e 17:30, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply about this. Now that you pointed it out, I do see that info on your table, although one of the symbols won't even display on my browser. I suppose IPA wasn't really designed with this in mind. - Nat Kraus e 10:12, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Re: Race

I think you're broadly right about how the article should be written. By the way, even if they didn't used to have a word for it, don't you find that Chinese people often tend to be very interested in the subject of race? For instance, the other day, I was involved in a conversation with a group of Chinese (I live in Anhui currently) people who, upon learning that I have partial German ancestry, decided that I "look German" (which, I suppose, is pretty much true) and proceded to debate amongst themselves whether having an indented chin like mine and a nose shape like mine are typical German characteristics. I wondered how many, if any, other people of German extraction they had ever met before. - Nat Kraus e 10:12, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I spent 7 years in Taiwan, so my experience may differ slightly from yours. I and every other white person regardless of actual ancestry was regarded as "Mei3 Guo2 ren2" (other words referring to nose configuration were popular too, especially in Taiwanese). They are certainly aware of differences, unabashedly so. I have body hair that looks black indoors but like filaments of gold under the sun, and at the beach or swimming pool little kids try to pull it off. I actually find that kind of open curiousity, and openness to differences, refreshing. That being said, I never found the Chinese to feel that they are biologically superior. Instead, when somebody starts a rant it with, "We have three thousand years of culture." I think they were set on the right road regarding human differences very near the beginning of written records of cultural artifacts. Right after Mencius comes Xun Zi. He taught that the most important thing is the impact of the culture on the individual -- a lesson that goes all the way back to the Duke of Zhou, at least in practice. Xun Zi says that if you put a child of an outlying tribal group into a Chinese home in infancy the child will grow up to be "Chinese." I can't remember the wording for sure, but he at least implies that a Chinese kid raised in a barbarian family will be a barbarian.

Maybe another factor is that entitlement came to a person not because of his [race] but because of his clan and family. There is something hereditary there, but also an awareness of accumulated wealth, wealth that can buy a good education, and the really interesting tradition of having a kind of family culture expressed in the form of a written document: This is the X family, this is what we value most highly, and this is the way we do things.

I suppose you have noticed that there are very strong preconceptions about what, e.g., Shanghai people are like, Fuzhou people are like, etc. Chinese people in Taiwan frequently don't want their kids to marry outside their original province, but that is because of language differences (I won't be able to understand your husband's father because he comes from Anhui.) and cultural differences (You can never figure out the real motivation of people from Fuzhou. How will I know what your in-laws really are thinking?). I've never heard anybody say, "If you marry a woman from Yunnan your kids will all turn out to be (whatever, whatever)." Actually, one of my Fuzhou family's cousins married a Swedish woman. Nobody ever complained that their children would have big noses. The mother was worried more about language, talking with her grandchildred since she didn't even speak English let alone Swedish -- which was what?

The people who formulate these kinds of things professionally say that the Chinese can be very ethnocentric, but I've never heard or seen written any account that suggests that they might be racist. I think you might compare their attitude (generalizing broadly, I realize) to my attitude toward languages. I've always been fascinated by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and I find the idea that languages like Shawnee can tesselate the world in such remarkably different ways from the way English does it. If I didn't have to make a living I might take a decade off to learn one of those languages. (Aramaic would be another good one.) But my fascination with the differences of languages doesn't include any idea that any one of them confers superiority on the individual.

How are you getting along in Anhui? One of my teachers in Taiwan was from Anhui. He had better English than I do, but his pu3 tong1 hua4 even gave the Chinese students fits. His speech retained the ru4 sheng1 (entering tone) and a heavy, heavy accent. I used to tape his 3 hour lectures and then take them to the dorm and decode them word by word. Sometimes my roommates couldn't help. What are you doing there, anyway? Have fun and enjoy a great learning by living experience! P0M 14:17, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't really know enough other than anecdotes to say in what way Chinese people are aware of differences. I have the impression that they interested in any and all types of group difference, linguistic, cultural, genetic, whatever they believe exists. The historical examples are interesting, and I think it's definitely the case that pre-modern China was much more willing to accept acculturated outlying populations than, say, European colonists in America, Africa, or Asia were (although that's not saying much). I do wonder, however, what would have happened had the Chinese been exposed to more physically dissimilar peoples. What I'm thinking is that most of the groups surrounding China in pre-modern times were what the Linnaeans would classify as Mongoloids, which may not mean anything genetically, but might map well against the perception of sameness/differentness. Based on the people I've met here from neighboring countries, I do realize that there are some differences in appearance, but I'll wager that many of them could pass for Chinese if they had been raised here, and that, for almost any of them, if they had a half-Chinese child who was raised here, the child could pass for Chinese. Don't the Manchurians nowadays pass as almost indistinguisable from the Hans? The same would probably not be true of people who look like me.

I know there must have been cases in the past where the Chinese encountered, say, pale-skinned Tocharians, or so-called Negrito southeast Asians, but I've never heard anything one way or the other on whether there interactions were different from those with, say, Koreans or Vietnamese. I suppose the native Taiwanese are among the more dissimilar people that the Chinese had large-scale interactions with, but, again, I don't know a great deal about the history there.

I'm doing just fine over here in Anhui. I've been here about five months, teaching English at Anhui University. To be honest, my Chinese is still terrible, and largely useless in practical situations, so I'm not very much of an expert on accents, but, yes, even I know that the Hefei accent is a hassle. Actually, it can be a real problem sometimes, because I still frequently having trouble understanding things people say in perfect putonghua, but the dialect issue means I sometimes have to wonder whether I should even try to understand some people. On the other hand, I don't know where in Anhui your teacher is from, but Hefeihua is at least theoretically related to Mandarin, whereas, for instance, my contact at the waiban here comes from a village in southern Anhui where they speak a dialect that sounds like Shanghainese, which is presumably this that I've read about on Wikipedia. - Nat Kraus e 19:22, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

One of my friends in Taiwan was actually of mixed parentage, but she looked totally African-American to me. Anyway, she was not the object of any more attention from people than I was, as far as I know. (When I went into the countryside for my weekly lessons with one gentleman I had to cross a river by ferry and when the oarsman got us to the other side there was always a gaggle of a dozen or so pre-teens who would line the side of the road and chant "Doap-pee ya, a dok-a" i.e., "hook nose beak nose" unceasingly.) Thanks for solving the mystery of my teacher's language. Everybody told me there were two Anhui accents and he had the bad kind. I wish I had not economized by recording over my class records. P0M 14:27, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I suspect that many are more interested in arguing than actually working on the article. If no one comments after a week or so, we can ask the admins to unprotect the page and get to working on other problems. Right now I think the article is light on details about genetics, but that's just the POV that I'm coming from. Rikurzhen

Thanks for your note. I have to admit that I find myself more captivated by the similarities between cultures than the differences, which is probably why I didn't enjoy intro sociology in college. As to the genetics section of the article, I think that there are lots of places where interesting and relevant details are missing. I've never read Luca's book, but I'm familiar with his work -- and his students' -- but I suspect that some of the info in it is out of date. There's an nice new article in Nature Reviews Genetics [3] (http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nrg/journal/v5/n8/full/nrg1401_fs.html) that seems to spell out a conservative concensus, so I was going to use that as a starting point for revisions. If there's enough new stuff, we could consider a separate article, but I doubt that it will be necessary. Rikurzhen

Image:RaceMugshots.jpg

Hello POM. First of all, thanks for changing the caption of the image, but not removing the image outright. It sounds better now and also makes the reader think. One of my activities here on Wikipedia is trying to add images where needed, as listed on Wikipedia:Requested pictures and also Wikipedia:Featured article candidates. That's how I got to the article Race in the first place. Thinking about how to illustrate race I was looking for a source of public domain passport style images to assemble a number of faces of different races/ethnicities/skincolors ... sort of what most people consider to be the difference between races. (Andy Warhole made something similar once, "Thirteen Most Wanted", and also got a very controversial reaction) About your objections:

"Race" does not have an operational definition, everybody has a differnet view what a race is: True. The image is only one example according to the FBI classification, and not an universal definition. This can be adequately expresed in the caption. (Again thanks for improving the caption). Many articles on Wikipedia show only example images, and having only "examples" on Race is no grounds for removal.
The images are racist: False. All races are equally treated in the image, and none looks better or worse than the other. All are wanted for murder/homicide except for asian and black female (couldn't find murderers)
The images are mugshots: True. This is about the only point where I think the image is flawed, and I would have preferred non-mugshots, but could not find a good source. Every society (race, whatever) has criminals, but most societies prefer to look away. Yet I do not think this flaw is grounds for removal.

This is a controversial topic, as can be seen on the number of people that removed and added the image. Also, some people have expressed that they find the image helpful, or at least do not oppose the image. Of course you have your right to object to the image, as well as I have the right to find it helpful. I see two possible ways out of this:

A new image is created that does not feature criminals but average people (preferably no celebrities either). Again, this will have to be a set of examples only, and the included bias will be noted in the caption.
We organize a vote to find out the majority view on Wikipedia about the image, and then keep or remove the image accordingly.

I am positive that we can overcome this dispute and eventually find an acceptable solution. BTW, a quick question: Why are you adding § to the beginning of every paragraph? Just curious. Best regards -- Chris 73 | Talk 05:25, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. Good news (for you) first: I'll refrain from adding the image to Race, although I feel the article looses a valuable example (not a fixed definition of race). I can understand your opposition to mug shots, although I do feel different. However, I can't quite understand your opposition to general images of happy, smiling, pretty, non-felon example images. Anyway, I'll be looking for a new home for the image, maybe at Felony?

About §: makes sense. I hate it when people write between my comments. I usually drop them a line and ask them not to, and often move inserted comments to the end after my text (It's MY comment, after all ;-) Anyway, happy editing, and let me know on Wikipedia:Requested pictures when you need an image -- Chris 73 | Talk 13:07, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I am still not happy with the mug shots although the caption is accurate, at least, now.

However I am frustrated with Darrien. PLEASE see [[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_mediation#Requests_for_mediation)] and do anything else you think reasonable, Slrubenstein

Explicit photo license

Hey there. Would you be so kind as to edit your wonderful Image:Shepador Chewer.JPG with its licensing, such as {{GFDL}}? Thanks! Just trying to clear up all of the licensing issues on the dog photos. Elf | Talk 14:37, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Gender role

Per your comment on my talk page:

I'm not sure what spellings you actually changed in the "gender role" article

You can find this out via the page history, of course.

please be aware that when an article is started by someone using British spellings, we are supposed to stick with that set of conventions

Yes, I'm aware of that. On reviewing the changes I made to Gender role, I couldn't see any of my corrections that were specific to British or American English. Could you clarify your comment?

(As for the general point that it's best to be consistent within any given page, I agree of course. I sometimes make mistakes of this nature when fixing spelling because I run poorly-spelled pages through a spell checker which only has an American English dictionary installed. Most of the time I notice British spelling variants and don't correct them, but occasionally one will slip through.)

Also, it makes me sad that you reverted my edit. As far as I can see, the edit was fine -- even if there are some mistakes I'm not seeing, the majority of the changes it made were completely correct. If you had issue with some specific change(s), please only revert the change(s) in question.

Neilc 11:34, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the explanation. I think the current state of the article incorporates all my changes, so that's cool. My apologies if my first response wasn't in the proper spirit -- I was a little confused about your comments WRT British spelling and your decision to revert my changes. Anyway, I think we've cleared up the confusion. Sorry for marking the original edit "minor" -- I did that because the edit actually only changed a handful of words, but in retrospect I ought to use the "minor" modifier less liberally.

BTW, you mentioned manually copying out the text of an article to spell check it. That works, but there are also various browser extensions you can use that integrate a spell checker (such as SpellBound (http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/) for Mozilla or IESpell (http://www.iespell.com/) for IE). I've been using SpellBound, which works acceptably; the only problem is I can't see an easy way to set the dictionary to the union of UK and American English.

Best wishes!

Neilc 03:21, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Survey

Hi Patrick,

If you have time, please vote on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)#Survey. Thanks. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 23:33, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)

message

I fill in edit summaries in general but don't bother if i've marked something as minor or if filling it in would put me in a bad mood. Did you have some particular article or edit or change in mind? - Nunh-huh 07:25, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Brainwashing

Oh, please improve the brainwashing if you can. Andries 19:24, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It was not my edit -- ≈ jossi ≈ 19:52, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

Hi :-) I noted the name :-) SweetLittleFluffyThing 06:46, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hallo Patrick, thanks for your interest in the complicated and controversial subject of brainwashing. I am an ex-member of a purported cult, which explains my interest in the subject. See also my small essay about the subject (http://surrealist.org/betrayalofthespirit/brainwashing.html) (I do not intend to use this as a basis for the article.) What facts in the current article do you dispute? Andries 17:58, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Patrick, Thanks for your extensive reply. I borrowed a book by Robert Lifton from the university library Thought reform and the psychology of totalism but I still need to find time to read it. The root cause of the problem with the article is, I think, that it was written by (ex-)cult members, like me and Ed Poor, who do not know much about the origins of the term brainwashing but know quite a lot about the current debate about it and who do not believe that the concept can explain their involvement in cults. Andries 07:49, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I hope you agree with what I wrote. I hope we can finish the article on brainwashing and remove the disputed warning. Andries 19:29, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Edit summary

Obscure? It's been listed on "Capitalization" under Wikipedia:Edit summary legend or Wikipedia:Edit summary legend:Quick reference for a long time. Writing "capitalization" out in edit summaries hundreds of times can become a bit tedious. --Lowellian 05:42, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

talk:race

Hey, sorry if I came across badly, I explained things a bit better on the talk page in question. Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 15:37, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Oh dear, I had no idea you took those photos yourself. If it helps, I didn't mean the people were unattractive, only that the way they were arranged was hard on the eyes. Heads of varying sizes, and varying poses, and divergent backgrounds, etc... and the features which assist in discerning race were hard to see. Hope you accept my apology, and I will be more careful w my edit summaries / comments in the future. Sorry again, Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 19:40, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Archive1

I moved your article Archive 1 to User:Patrick0Moran/Archive 1. Rick K 08:26, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I thought it was an archive of your talk page. Yes, I'll delete it. Rick K 21:50, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the Welcome

Thanks for you kind note welcoming me to Wikipedia. I know this is late in coming, but it took me a while to find out how to get here. (What can I say? I'm a techno-idiot.) So, you're a spider person who snatches specimens who come to visit. CREEEEEP-PY! :-p deeceevoice 14:41, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Tarantella

I assume you are referring to the edit summary that reads (there's an article on the subject, put this there). I removed some info from the disambig block because it was not needed to identify Tarantella, Inc. from the dance. There is an article on Tarantella, Inc. which should, and does, include all relevant info. Tuf-Kat 01:37, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. I'll be fairly busy for about a week or so, but after that I can have a look at things if you so wish. Dysprosia 09:05, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Race

not at all! I apologize for any apparent antagonism! When I said 'are you colour-blind?', I was seriously considering a rather frequent condition, and it would have been useful to have somebody who is colourblind comment on the scale, to assure that it is visible to everybody. Sorry if I seemed rude. dab 08:43, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Puppy photo

A user asks here about whether this puppy is really a mix or a purebred, say, Anatolian Shepherd. I've already responded, but perhaps you could comment on the source of its ancestry determination? Thanks! Elf | Talk 02:03, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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Race: Post_Tax_Day_Changes

MSG

Race

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Horses and people

Horses and people

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Sex article

Chinese IPA

Re: Race

Image:RaceMugshots.jpg

Explicit photo license

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Archive1

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