User talk:Barnaby dawson
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Whoever it is who is vandalising these pages could you please refrain from doing so. You can be banned from editing wikipedia if you repeatedly commit acts of vandalism.
Welcome to Wikipedia! I saw you were doing some good writing on direct democracy, and wanted to tell you to keep up the good work. Here are a few tips if you need any help:
- You can ask questions at Wikipedia:Help desk
- Or read up at Wikipedia:FAQ
- Wikipedia:Tutorial will teach you how to edit
- Wikipedia:Manual of style is our writing guide
- Wikipedia:Policies--read it eventually
Best wishes, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 14:47, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC) P.S. You can sign your name with four tildes, like this: ~~~~
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Liberal democracy
146.124.141.250 made again a lot of changes in the text on Liberal democracy, forgetting that Wikipedia should be neutral. I will try to change the text later. Your suggestion to integrate Liberal democracy into Democracy is positive but we might have to integrate more articles, like representative democracy and direct democracy. Gangulf 14:23, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Help
Sorry to bother you, but you seem to know what you're doing on Wikipedia. I was viewing the article on Freedom of Speech, and I deleted the whole text and left it only with "[censored]" (sorry, but I couldn't resist). I don't want to be an ass and have you clean up after me, but I know there's an easy way to bring back the previous version and unfortunately I don't know how it's done. So if you would be so kind as to fix it, I would appreciate it very much. Sorry for the trouble!
Don't worry about it. Someone came along 12 minutes after you made your change and wikipedia:revert it to the previous version. On wikipedia you can click on the tab wikipedia:history to view previous versions of a page. If you select a previous version and then save it you can restore an old version of the page that is not vandalised. But hey don't do it again! Barnaby dawson 21:06, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Tips:
- use a lowercase 'a' in See also
- you can use a : to indent text instead of using preformatted text by adding a space to the beginning of the line
By the way, I don't think it would be best to link to wikibooks that do not appear to be very complete yet. It's up to you, though. Dysprosia 13:42, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Hello. I notice you been adding a huge number of "See also" sections, with a capital "A" in "Also". As you see in Wikipedia:Manual of Style, lower-case is conventional here. Thus
Right:
See also
Wrong:
See Also
Michael Hardy 21:26, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Factory farming and Propaganda
Barnaby, I did leave some notes on the talk page why I had no doubt that this link was propaganda. If you will read my notes and see the article on propaganda, I think you will have to agree that this link is classic propaganda, even though you may agree with it. If you still disagree, for the sake of harmony, please by all means change it back. --H2O 10:52, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Electronic direct democracy
Hi Barnaby, I moved the EDD talk from my personal talk to the Direct democracy talk, where I responded. I think this discussion should be kept "in public" so that others may wish to engage in it. -- Stevietheman 12:16, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Re: 0/0
That was a fantastic rewrite! I've changed my vote to keep. (And people say that VfD doesn't work.) --Ardonik.talk() 17:29, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
I second that. Good rewrite! Antandrus 17:30, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
From User page:
- What you've done is very good. I'm actually experiencing sibling-rivalry-like pangs because I started working on this—you can see what I've got on User:Dpbsmith/temp—but what you've got is much more straightforward and to the point. I might come back and polish it sometime. What I've written myself currently has too much in it about numbers and intuition and not enough about 0/0.
- I think you should definitely copy what you have to a temporary location somewhere in case the 0/0 page does get deleted. I'm not sure where this material should go. It could go in Division by zero or Indeterminate form or possibly on a new page, Zero divided by zero. I'm going to these comments on Michael Hardy's talk page, too, and see if he has any thoughts.
- Actually, I have a technical question for Michael Hardy. It's one of the things that has hung me up a bit. What is the most correct answer to the question "What is the value of sin(0)/0?" I guess the question is, what is the meaning of "sin(0)/0"? If it means the value of sin(0) divided by 0, then the answer is "indeterminate" or "NaN" (not a number), as I don't believe 0/0 is part of any definition of "number" that has ever been proposed. On the other hand, if it means "the limit of sin(x)/x as x approaches zero," the answer is not indeterminate at all, it is 1. It just "feels wrong" to me to say that sin(0)/0 is indeterminate, though; I feel that it "is" 1. Thoughts?
I am sorry that Michael Hardy has chosen to bite your finger instead of looking where you were pointing. Apparently he is not sympathetic to the needs of those at a lower level of mathematical sophistication than himself.... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 22:32, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
0/0 and zero divided by zero
Hello Barnaby, a couple of comments in response to your message. (1) The previous content of 0/0 is still recoverable after a redirect; you can find it in the page history. If you want to restore 0/0, take it up on talk:0/0. Making a new page (zero divided by zero in this case) because of an edit conflict is frowned upon, I'm afraid. I'll probably redirect zero divided by zero to indeterminate form unless some good reason to keep it separate comes up in discussion in the next few days. (2) Yes, I know that the page was revised after being listed on vfd. However, I'm generally in agreement w/ Mike Hardy that the revised page is still weak; that's why I redirected it. One comment on the text at this point is that a basic or simple explanation is usually not a lengthy explanation; my advice, if you care, is to strive for concision at all levels of mathematics. Regards & happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 14:57, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- The new version is a completely new text from the old version. If you read the talk page of zero divided by zero you will find that the intention is to incorporate parts of the text into indeterminate form. I didn't know there was any established ettiquiete for what to do if you rewrite an article that is up for deletion or redirection and that is lost through the decision upon that page. If the article had not been up for deletion then I would have reverted you and asked for an explanation but I just assumed you were taking action upon the voting on 0/0. Explanations maybe short (as indeed is the one given in the article) but supporting examples may take more space and exposing the errors in reasoning that cause people to think 0/0 has a numerical value is not without use either. Why not work with me to incorporate as much as possible of the text of zero divided by zero into the article on indeterminate form or other articles where it is relevent? Once this has been done I do agree the article can be redirected. Barnaby dawson 17:22, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Hello Barnaby. About 0/0, after further reflection I think it should be redirected to division by zero and any further development on the topic of 0/0 should go there. I might work on that soon. Wile E. Heresiarch 15:17, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Amy Nelson's comments
Hi Barnaby, I saw that you restored comments to my user page, as you stated this is etiquette. However I believe I am not breaking any rules by editing my own page if I wish to do so, and I had very good reason to edit it. Please do not restore things to my user page or talk page again, if people wish to look at the history that is their choice. I am not greatly concerned with etiquette, as I had good reason to edit. AmyNelson.
Barnaby, your note on my page reads like a threat, I dont beleive I would be banned for deleting something I felt necessary on my own page and I dont appreciate your suggestion. Please DO NOT post on my talk page again, I will now have to further delete your unwelcome "possibilty of banning" note! I have done nothing wrong accept offend your sense of etiquette. User:AmyNelson 23:38, Oct 2, 2004
- In response to Amy's comments I would say that unlike her I will not remove her comments that are critical of myself despite disagreeing with them. For the record the comments that I made on her page that she has deleted are archived here. Others can judge for themselves whether Amy Nelson's reaction to these comments is reasonable. Barnaby dawson 10:16, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Mafia (game)
Thanks for your comment on the infobox I put into the Mafia article. I know there are version in which you play with less than the 7 players I mentioned, but those would be, IIRC, variants to the normal game. That's why I didn't mention them. If you have any other comments regarding edits I have done, feel free to contact me. [[User:MacGyverMagic|Mgm|(talk)]] 15:33, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)
The angel problem
Is the power of an angel measured as Pythagorean or New York distance? Or some other metric? -- The Anome 10:58, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
New york distance Barnaby dawson 16:27, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Third pair mutations
thank you so much for spending the time to clarify the third-base pair stuff on my talkpage -- what you said made a LOT of sense ... and now i can see your point. i've got some reading to do:). thanks again:). Ungtss 00:24, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Question on mutation rates
i put this on the page ... i figured i'd put it here too just in case:) -- i really appreciate your help with this stuff:). i guess the question i'm left with is this: "what's the NORM for this variation? what are we comparing it TO?" because after we differentiated from the single-celled organisms, they would have gone through MANY MILLIONS of more generations than we would have (because our lifespans got longer while theirs stayed the same) ... same thing with the chimps, who reach sexual maturity at age 8 ... so their non-coding segments would have had much more opportunity to vary than ours -- how can we COMPARE the degrees of randomness, to show relationship? what's our null? any thoughts? Ungtss 04:11, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It's not exactly the generations in bacteria that count its the rate of mutation and yes it is higher in bacteria. However, we can take that into account in our calculations and get a better figure for when a creatures line split from the prokaryotes. In sexual species the life span is more relevent but I think comparisons are often done on mitochondrial DNA which doesn't undergo sexual recombination. In plants chloroplasts are used to.
None of this effects the structure of the relationships between species. A non-tree relationship would generally remain so even if we got mutation rates wrong. What we do get is a distorted picture of when certain evolutionary events happened. Because of this many people work on ways to gauge rates of mutation. If I know two species originate from one species and I have a third closely related to those two then I can calculate how much mutation appears to have occured in each. The third species lets me judge what the original gene looked like when the two were one species. This allows me to see how variable the mutation rates are.
One thing that is difficult to gauge like this is large scale variations in mutation rates (maybe some star went supernova). This would distort the tree we get in that every organism (in our tree) 5 million years old might look like its 5.5 million years old (because all were subject to higher mutation rates for 2 million years). We can rule out the bigger such possible effects by looking at the geological strata and comparing age estimates for species that appear in there with age estimates obtained by phylogenetic trees. There will be some residual error which is too small to register in this comparison. Also, we can assume that the mutation rate wasn't drastically higher because we know mutation rates higher than a certain value will kill creatures. Like a lot of science in this area we obtain estimates from all available sources and compare them. While each individual estimate may have a high variance the estimates combined will have a low variance. Hope this is of help, Barnaby dawson 11:11, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
- thanks again:). Ungtss 13:52, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
no apology needed
no offense taken:).
Limestone
"Deep limestone deposits are most reasonably explained as rapidly precipitating when CO2 suddenly escapes from carbonate-saturated ground water" - Limestone can be formed in many ways, in fact anywhere CaCO3 accumulates, you can get limestone. This quote is probably talking about some unusual formation or something, but can't be refering to the way all limestone is formed. Without knowing what the author means by "Deep limestone deposit", the quote is rather meaningless. In short, this needs further elaboration as to what the writer is trying to support by using this quote and what the original author of the article was saying.
"Uniformitarian explanations fail because gradualism predicts a great deal of mixing in the formation of limestone, which is not observed." What..? Who says "mixing" is needed? All that's needed is accumulation of calcium carbonate and a little heat and pressure. There is no "mixing" needed.
"Further, for every molecule of limestone that precipitates, a carbon ion is released, predicting an equivalent amount of carbon in the atmospheres and seas as in limestone formations, while the amount of carbon in limestone on Earth exceeds the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and seas combined by almost 2000 times." Every molecule of limestone? Why is carbon released? Released from what? Why does the carbon "released" from CaCO3 have to equal that in the atmosphere? And you'd expect carbon levels to be higher in surface rock than in the atmosphere. Why do they have to be the same? The original article might answer these questions...but we don't know from this quote.
In short: these quotes, to be taken seriously, need more background as to what the gist of the original articles are. The quotes are really meaningless and I wouldn't accept them as supporting anything. If you are going to use them, consider giving some wider context, like stating "In an article where the author tries to prove, observe, relate...", then after giving context go to the specifics of these quotees. They are not so great as they are rather out of context and any careful reader will spot that.
Anyway, my two cents worth. Hope I wasn't too long-winded. --DanielCD 22:21, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Thank you for that explanation. I shall remove the quotes from the page and cite your critique as an explanation. I don't know the wider context btw as I didn't produce the quotes. Regards :) Barnaby dawson 22:26, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Views of creationists
Barnaby, I feel your pain. The problem with the views page, as I see it, is that the agenda is set by creationists. Scientists have a wholly separate discussion on the subjects listed, and they are obviously not seen as part of the same agenda. No matter how you format the page it's always going to be on the one side the creationist bollocks about a particular area of science and on the other the completely unconnected scientific explanation of it. But the right hand is rarely an actual refutation of the left (which is why creationists love this kind of thing -- they can make it look as though science ignores this wonderful explanation and this damning evidence they have come up with -- but let's face it, science does not investigate hypotheses such as a gushing fountain of carbon dioxide from an underground reservoir providing all the world's limestone because it's on the face of it ridiculous; it does not give a second's thought to creationist carping about radiometric dating because it simply does not share the belief that radiometric dating was invented solely to con people into believing fossils are old).
Science has its own issues and debates. It barely pays attention to creationists. When it does, it destroys creationist arguments with devastating critique, but frankly it's always going to be on a loser. When you are debating a guy like Sarfati, you are up against a guy who will selectively choose from millions of facts (which scientists do not have the liberty of doing -- their theories must try to fit all the facts if they are to be accepted) and will ignore any counterarguments, or claim that they are motivated by other considerations (scientists cannot do that either -- they can't say "you made these observations to destroy my phlogiston theory because you [insert reason]". They also continuously move the goalposts. You could call it "reformulating the hypothesis" if it weren't for the hypothesis' being completely refuted. Take Behe. He says "you can't evolve a flagellum because it looks too complicated for natural selection". He is shown how and it's pointed out to him that the parts were coopted from other uses as many, many parts of many, many lifeforms are (Behe has to ignore most of the evidence to even begin to have a case, but that is of course what he does: he picks the evidence that he thinks fits best and attacks that). A scientist would simply give up the ghost.
Most importantly, I think, only the left-hand side actually is composed of "views". It's a collection of the wild speculation that creationists indulge in. The right-hand side, if it were really to give the "views" of scientists, would simply quote a Dawkins saying that it's all bollocks made up by charlatans and leave it at that.
Good luck with your studies, Barnaby.Dr Zen 23:25, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Re: Wikipedia:News sources/Internet/Africa
The moment when I visited the page it had just one external link and no write up. I thought a page with just one External link and no introduction was not a suitable article. So I marked it for deletion. And probably I was not wrong as same was felt by the administrators. Gaurav1146 12:27, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
The point is that it isn't by itself a page. It's a subpage. It's not accessible except through wikipedia:News sources. It is also clear that it can be made into a useful subpage. As such it is not reasonable to list it for deletion especially speedy deletion. Please can you remove the tag for deletion (I can't as I created the page).
Perhaps you came across this page out of the context of wikipedia:News sources. If so could you tell me how. I do not want other subpages still in their infancy to be deleted in error.
In general a subpage with this little text would not be useful. However, the purpose of the news sources collection is to provide NPOV by categorizing news sources a heirarchical structure. As such there must will be subpages with little on them. Barnaby dawson 12:42, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Re: Wikipedia:News sources/Internet/Africa
I got your point and I have removed the tag. I came to this page through RC Patrol. Sorry for the inconvenience. Gaurav1146 12:57, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
About the quote
So you are a faint-hearted biologist? I honestly doubt that! Please keep in mind, Mr. Dawson, that in no way does your acceptance of evolution have anything to do with being a passionate scientist. You can be critical of neo-Darwinian views, and if they (your collegues) choose to excommunicate you, so to speak, then don't ever let that stop you from becoming a great scientist. In fact, your awareness to the flaws of evolutionary theory technically make you more suited for your practice. Scientists need to be open minded; if they ever lock themselves down on something, they may be missing critical information that could actually be helping them along. Also, why does that quote bother you? You said you weren't a neo-Darwinist, so what's the disagreement about? Regards, Salva31 06:47, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You've misread the passage I'm afraid. You seem to have assumed I wrote things that I did not. From my original post only the last two lines were written by me. I've edited it to try to make that more clear. Barnaby dawson 08:22, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I will remove it for now, since you claim to have helped with the paper, and because he does indeed seem to speak for his collegues rather than just himself. Thanks for your patience. Salva 17:16, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
See your talk page. I haven't claimed to have helped with the paper. Where I refer to "passage" above I'm talking about my comments on your talk page. Never the less I'm glad you've removed the quote. Barnaby dawson 17:31, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Civility
Sorry about that, but the comment was not related to you in any way. I didn't even realise the proximity to your comment. It wasn't exactly a polite things to say, and I regret saying it, but the comment was made about Salva - his comment made it apparent that he had either ignored or not read the replies to his question about radiometric dating. His reply started with a comment to "Grant", which Graft changed (with an edit summary something like "argh!". This was after he had fixed his name recently on the same page, I believe (I'd have to look at the diffs). So, I was struck by Salva's failure to digest what we had said to him, and his failure to read Graft's name right...
It wasn't a nice thing to say, but it was absolutely not aimed at you. Sorry about that though.
Out of curiosity - what is your field of study (your user page has me curious). Guettarda 20:56, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Neutrality
Hi Barnaby. You seem civil. Have you looked at Creationism and evolution related pages? From what I read, you seem pretty neutral, and I was wondering if you would like to help make disputed articles dealing with these subjects better. If so, would you be interested in joining this group: Creationism and Evolution NPOV Society? Please respond when you have a chance. Mred64 00:46, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
NPOV (Comparison of views in science)
Good point. I've changed it from 'guideline' to 'proposed'. It looked like a good idea to me so I wrongly assumed that it would therefore make a good guideline; if it does not have consensual support (yet?) then it isn't a guideline (yet?). Yours, Radiant_* 07:24, May 23, 2005 (UTC)
Re: Views of Creationists and mainstream scientists compared
at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Views_of_Creationists_and_mainstream_scientists_compared&action=edit Are you looking for Voluteers to start this page, or are you already working on it? The Title says: Invitation... If you are looking for Voluteer Creationists, I may be able to find some to assist with this article, or write the Creationist Portion. --Truthteller 14:37, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The page you refer to has been deleted. I've replied further on your talk page. Barnaby dawson 14:39, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)