Hi! Unfortunately you picked someone on whom there's not to much to say. What do you want to know? I'm from Calgary, am currently at the UniversityOfWaterloo?. I've spent most of my life learning about things, but of course that doesn't mean I'm any good at writing about them. Mathematics is an old interest, which springs out of the discovery of graphs on a summer vacation...I actually bothered to plot x^3+y^3=1 by hand just to see it...these are all very old memories.
Q. One of the things I am wondering is if you, like myself, have an interest in/ facility for Mathematics, as well as Linguistics and Languages? It appears to be a somewhat unusual combination.
I definitely have an interest in both, and a facility for Mathematics. As for language ability I'm not so sure. I took French immersion early on and was good enough to think it fluently, but since then almost all of my vocabulary has been forgotten. Since then I've taken a little German, and am taking Latin, and again have trouble keeping a full vocab. At least when I got lost in Paris I could find my way.
Three things I really like are etymologies, phonetics, and alphabets. I wonder if you tend to go for the same things? My best friend's also good at math and languages, so either it's not so unusual or we just attract each other. :)
I have degrees in both Math and Linguistics. In Math, I like Abstract Algebra best; in Linguistics, I like Syntax best. Like you, I started French early, in third grade, and continued through college. I have also studied German, Latin, Greek, and Japanese. Latin and Greek are great tools if you are interested in English or Romance etymology. Picking up on your interest in phonetics, we could surely use your help at Nupedia in the Copyeditame-L and Pronounce-L lists, to help provide pronunciations for our articles. I hope I am not intruding with this last remark.
Of course you're not. As I said, I have copious amounts of free time on my hands. What exactly would that involve? (Btw, I suspect liking AbstractAlgebra? best is almost as rare as math-linguistics - virtually everyone I know is an analysis fan).
At the moment we have Prounciation Guides for American English and British English. All articles to date are identified as written in one of these languages. As a member of Nupedia, you would have to sign-up for the Copyedit-L, Copyeditame-L and Pronounce-L lists. These are available for sign-up from your member page under Mailing Lists. Also, you would have to look at and get comfortable using our AME prounciation guide at: http://www.nupedia.com/pronguide.shtml You might be interested in the Copyeditbre-L list, as well. Here you need to look at and learn to use our BRE prounciation Guide at: http://www.nupedia.com/pronguidebre.html
We have at least one article, already posted and some in the works that have no pronunciations for unfamiliar words and foreign words, simply because there is no one to supply them, using these guides. Such articles can be found in the main page of Nupedia, under New Articles, and in the Copyediting area which you will find a link to, after logging in, on you member page. Look for articles in the Open Copyedit area. If you have any questions, feel free. As usual this is purely voluntary. RoseParks email: rose.parks@att.net
I read lots. :) I need more practice writing, it would seem, because that page is overcrowded. Biology is one of the subjects I really like...back home I have some jars set aside for protozoa, and I have some pictures of them at http://cyaxares.tripod.com/protozoa/, on the off-chance that anyone's interested in my hobbies.
Joshua, I think pictures are great. It's probably best if I copy the image to this server, and we change the URL to serve it from here, because Tripod may not appreciate our loading it from a remote location, etc., etc. --Jimbo Wales
If you want to keep it, I would love for you to upload it. It's my own slightly-blurry amateur attempt, so better pictures might come along - although of course amateur attempts are the essence of wiki, and it guarantees that it's free. :) I might want my name stuck to it, though. What are you planning to do when wikipedia gets many, many more illustrations?
I haven't the least plan at all, I'm afraid. One possibility is to add a way for people to upload their pictures into an images directory. That's easy enough to do.
Feel free to email me.
Come to the Sandbox. I put the Greek alphabet there. RoseParks
It's mentioned near the bottom of How does one edit a page...I'm not sure if that documents everything, but if not, the rest'll be on the UseModWiki home page. Wikis are really cool, but they'll sap away your life, so be careful. :)
Thanks for the response. Now I feel less of a fool. I can definitely see how this can be terribly, terribly addictive, though. pb
Thanks very much! Actually, though, I was just referring to a typo - Artiodactlya? - of the sort that has a remarkable habit of spreading. :)
Hi Josh. We are talking back and forth on tensor/lin alg at times. I am an engineer and geologist currently programming unix sockets code... I have almost no free time at all. Thanks for your comments on those pages.
Hi, 198.144.199. If you don't mind my saying so, you could use a name or alias so we can tell when something is you...it's a pleasure to meet you, thanks very much for your praise, especially of Tensor/Alternate? which I had really thought to be obtuse and of no help to anyone who doesn't already know what a tensor is. :)
I have spent a fair amount of time over the last few years pondering tensors... Scientists and engineers throw the term around around pretty freely, but my suspicion is they don't really know what it means. They just have the rules memorized. ;)
No, the classification is definitely Archaea-Eukaryota-Eubacteria. The first group are not eukaryotes and have basically the same structure as normal bacteria, so are definitely prokaryotes, and are precisely the difference between the Prokaryota and Eubacteria. I'm very certain about this, but if you want a reference anyways, the [tree of life] comes to mind.
BF, if you feel that you have been revealed the proper truth, I'm not going to try and persuade you otherwise. Simply understand that many other people have made the same claim with different truths, and for those of us who have not had revelations there is no way to judge which or indeed if any of those claims are true. The scientific method, as always, is for judging between alternatives based on information you have, not based on information you don't have. But if revelations are indeed necessary to understand a particular point of view, asserting it is the truth probably won't convince anyone, as it will be lost against the myriad of other people asserting the same thing about different views, and ends up simply being annoying.
Osmama bin Laden perhaps believes he is obeying His truth, a personal truth. I understand the implications, and also know that when the real Truth is spoken it allows for interpretation, meaning to adulterate the simple sets of schema that Truth is always presented with. If you take a quick look at all the sages and holy men and women throughout history who were brave enough to even try to bother to state that Truth, it is deceptively simple, Reagan logic, whatever. I get more complex in [[| Talk]] because I am aware that the the people do not even bother to try a few levels of interpretation before they slam the door down and haul back the 500 year old age Newtonian school of thought. Hey didn't the Inquistion end in the mid 90's or are people still doing copy cat peer assertions ?BF
That was the second of two reasons given for reverting the font. The first is that it doesn't seem to have any purpose except in forcing your personal favorite letters on other people. I don't like that font as much as my default, and if I did, I would set it to be my default. We shouldn't presume to dictate other people's tastes in scripts, or browsers for that matter. --Josh
Better than I said it. :-) --KQ
I did pay attention to the contents first, and my opinion is that the article in question is a gross violation of the neutral point of view policy, but I decided to be generous and give you a chance to bring it inline before I slice it to pieces. BF, you are not the only one here. Please be considerate and show some respect for the opinion of your co-authors.
BF - welcome to a preliminary lesson in how an anarchic cooperative actually works. The good news is, you have the right to do anything you damn well please. The bad news is, so do we. When those who want font variation outnumber those who don't, you will see it everywhere. Until then, "ignorant cretins with no appreciation for creative self-expression" like myself, Josh and KQ will happily wander around undoing all of your lovely handiwork. - MB
BF, I don't want you to leave, and would feel very bad if any of my actions caused you to do so. Try to understand. I sympathize with your attempts to present a minority view, myself holding several in politics if not on science, which I would hate to see treated unfairly. But as I do not want them trampled, so I can understand that others will not want their views attacked, and thus we have the compromise of a neutral point of view. I have explained this many times, both that it is convention and the reason it is convention, and it is frustrating to see it entirely neglected. I understand I'm taking a hard line, but what else can I do? Let wikipedia be a forum for polemics? In that case I would want to leave, and probably others besides me.
As stated, I want New Age to receive a fair treatment, and you can feel free to question any edits I make to it or any other text you write and expect an explanation. In the case of this most recently deleted text, I removed it only seemed to suggest that new ideas are inherently good without explaining anything about new age beliefs - as opposed to for instance the bit about logic being a limitation in one's world view, which is a genuine explanation of why some people believe in new age material, and will not be deleted by my hands.
Btw, there are two wikis I know of - [WhyClublet] and [AndStuff] - which are dedicated entirely to dicussion of world views. If you're interested in a place to provide a non-neutral exposition of your beliefs, I'm sure they would be happy to have you.
I'm excited about M-Theory because it is similar to New Age ideas, this time in the crucial science of Physics. My notes on this include statements from physicists stating "that after Einstein, space and time began dissolving away." And that is one of my own ideas without even studying physics. I did need to read up on Physics back in 1998 in order to verify some statements in James Redfield's non-fiction book The Celestine Vision thanks for dropping by. Help if you want on this new article !
I'm afraid I don't know much about M-theory, though it sounds very cool. Please don't take my insistence that it not be called the theory of everything as a sign that I think something is wrong with it, it's just that experimental evidence is not yet good enough to judge among our options. I'll try and write some supporting articles, though tonight my writing is showing how late it is.
I sympathize with you about theory of everything. M-theory is also called the "Mother of all theories", in the same common laywoman's terms that you dispute. All it is is a nickname, got it now ?
No. Theory of everything means something very specific to physicists, it means the theory which accurately describes all four fundamental forces together, the same way that a grand unified theory is something which explains them all except gravity. I suppose it might be fair to say that it is a theory of everything, though I've never seen the term used without a definite article, but saying that it is the theory of everything is making specific claims about how correctly it matches reality. It is certainly not a nickname.
Something Michio Kaku wrote is interesting. "Vafa recently added a strange twist to this when he introduced yet another mega-theory, this time a 12 dimensional theory called F-theory (F for "father") which explains the self-duality of the IIb string. (Unfortunately, this 12 dimensional theory is rather strange: it has two time co-ordinates, not one, and actually violates 12 dimensional relativity. Imagine trying to live in a world with two times! It would put an episode of Twilight Zone to shame.) So is the final theory 10, 11, or 12 dimensional?
Schwarz, for one, feels that the final version of M-theory may not even have any fixed dimension. He feels that the true theory may be independent of any dimensionality of space-time, and that 11 dimensions only emerges once one tries to solve it. Townsend seems to agree, saying "the whole notion of dimensionality is an approximate one that only emerges in some semiclassical context." I think you need to contact them for a better answer. It may involve the duality principle.
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