Wikipedia: AxelBoldt/Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Axel,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers,

  --AxelBoldt

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

: I'm 35 and planning my retirement. --Axel

Just think how many Wikipedia articles you could write once retired! :-) --Belltower

Believe it or not, that was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the above sentence. --Axel

Looking at your entries in the recent changes, this would be different than now because...? ;-) --Belltower

: Because classes start on Monday :-( --Axel

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

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

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

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

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

Axel,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many thanks -- sodium.

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

The actual, full quotation is:

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

--TheCunctator

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

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

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

--little guru

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