User talk:Toby Bartels/2003

If you have a chance, stop by the Wikipedia accessibility meta page. It's related to the issue of alt text for images, as well as other potential problems. It'd be good to have your input! -- Wapcaplet 17:17 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yep, I found it. That's a lot of good work that you have there! And it links to some other quite interesting pages on similar topics. -- Toby Bartels 18:46 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hi, I am a new comer here, and I found u at Queer wikipedians. I am now working mainly on Chinese verision about gay-related articals. And I think you can help me a lot. Hopefully we can be friends! :D --Gboy 04:11 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Actually, I don't know much about queer issues. And I know very little Chinese. But you can certainly ask me questions here; I just don't know how much help I'll be! -- Toby Bartels 06:22 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thank you! I found that there are so little information about gay in Chinese version that I am so shame of it. I am now planning to translate all the gay-related articles from English into Chinese. Gay can do things perfect too (much better sometimes) ! :D I am now looking for some info about crackdown on gay in any countries, I don't know if you have any? Thanks! :D --Gboy 07:54 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Offhand, the only link that I know of that covers the whole world is Age of Consent. This site isn't focussed on gays, but it does cover when gay sex has different legal definitions of consent than straight sex -- including when it's entirely illegal. Other than this, I only know resources focussed on the United States, like Human Rights Campaign. -- Toby Bartels 18:39 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thank you so much! :D --Gboy 02:42 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

In Talk:Existential quantifier, you seems to imply me that I am wrong to say ∃ is a symbol. Maybe I am wrong (I don't think I am completely wrong) but you at least have to explain to me what it is. I start that article because I wish some experts will come and fix it! wshun 03:43 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think that it's wrong to focus on the symbol; the links to Existential quantifier (with the exception of E) are really interested in the logical concept of Existential quantification, not in the particular symbols used to denote it. But see my comments on the talk page; the whole area needs a rewrite, and I plan to give it one on Sunday. -- Toby Bartels 04:07 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It is much better now. Good job, thank you.-- wshun 22:36, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I posted this at Wikipedia talk:Sites that use Wikipedia for content but you didn't respond, so I am posting it here:

I've made a few changes to Wikipedia:Copyrights in anticipation of updating our copyright notice on the bottom of the page. I purpose that the new notice read "All text is available under the terms of the GFDL. See Wikipedia:Copyrights for details." Right now the link at the bottom links to a page which redirects to Wikipedia:Copyrights, but being that the GFDL is intimidating to most to read, people are less likely to click on the current link and read the terms of copying.

I would like some feedback before purposing this on the mailing lists. Thanks. (Please post replies to my talk page) MB 18:00, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Mine is similar, but shorter, so it will fit better. ミハエル (MB) 13:57, Aug 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hey, Toby, 'sup? -- Miguel

You've been quite active lately, haven't you? Don't you have anything better to do with your time? -- Toby Bartels 14:26, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It's called procrastination, Toby. It all started because I had to prepare a lecture here at PI, because of the blackout, and because I figured it can't be that hard to make it to the list of most active wikipedians. -- Miguel

You started working on the Internet because of the blackout? A likely story! ^_^ -- Toby Bartels 22:42, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Because of, not during! :-D -- Miguel

I've just posted the following to Talk:Group (mathematics); you may wish to comment.

I'm wondering whether someone more familiar with this material could revise the beginning of this article. Saying that the concept of "group" is fundamental to modern algebra says nothing about what it is. Admittedly we don't need to go far in the article before we encounter basic definitions, but these will be of no help to a person who has difficulty following these very elementary mathematical expressions. I got here when I tried to deal with the word "Abelian" in Wiktionary. Although it is very easy to deal with the concept of Abelian group once a person knows what a group is, getting from set to group has not been made so obvious. ☮ Eclecticology 20:42, 2003 Sep 8 (UTC)

In an item about which a vote is being conducted, I've posted a vote and am personally offended by the item. This comment is anonymous for privacy reasons. -- anon

Thank you, this is very helpful. (Incidentally, you were logged in when you wrote that!) -- Toby Bartels 02:57, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

No insults please[edit]

Toby, please restrain yourself from insulting comments like:

It is RK's pattern of deception and lying, as above, that makes so many Wikipedians disagree with him as a matter of course -- and made so many (albeit fewer) glad that he had left when he had.

In particular, the phrase pattern of deception and lying is inflammatory. It would really be better to say that RK often says things that you're sure are wrong --Uncle Ed 15:29, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

This comment was not an insult, and it was not directed to RK. It was not intended to hurt him but rather to clarify what seemed unclear in the discussion preceding it, a discussion that many besides RK might read. Now, I won't argue that the comment was helpful, all things considered (whether it made a useful contibution to the discussion, whether it was in the right place, whether it might just make things worse when RK inevitably reads it, etc), and I probably wouldn't write it if I had to do things over again.

However, as a matter of principle, one cannot interpret the call to be kind to others so broadly that one is unable to speak the truth. This principle is not about RK; if SV really were a Nazi, then RK might well have been correct to point it out! And to say that RK often says things that I'm sure are wrong would have been quite insufficient for my meaning. People do not disagree with him as a matter of course simply because I am often sure that he is wrong! Rather, some people disagree with him as a matter of course because he has a pattern of deception and lying. This statement is not gratuitous slander, but fact, documented on several occasions on the mailing list and in various talk and meta pages (some now deleted), not to mention the incidents mentioned in my post.

And this is a serious problem; even when RK tells the truth, he is not believed. (That is why EntmootsOfTrolls went on so long.) Indeed, there are plenty of people that I often disagree with, but very few (and no valuable contributor to Wikipedia other than RK) that I often mistrust. I am a naturally trusting, perhaps even gullible, person; so I find it a sad thing when I can no longer trust a fellow human being. '_`

-- Toby Bartels 02:57, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I have no idea how others view the issue. Obviously, I remain of the same line of thought; so I will find it hard not to edit the page to coincide with my view of the subject. Lirath Q. Pynnor

I hope that you will edit it to coincide with NPOV, rather than with The Truth. For example, if it turns out that sources on Islam disagree over whether Jesus was an ascetic (I don't know, I'm just supposing), then the article should reflect this; even if The Truth is that Jesus is an ascetic in Islam. -- Toby Bartels 19:26, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Of course, but Im not aware of any such sources. Lirath Q. Pynnor

This example is only relevant if other people bring up such sources, or if your sources are unclear about whether they apply universally. If you use NPOV if and when that should ever happen, then you're doing fine. -- Toby Bartels 20:04, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I was editing the name of Daniel Alfredsson just as you were. I wanted it to direct to his own page where I would post information about him, rather than redirect to the player's name list. -- User:SD6-Agent

Hi Toby, I found an interesting remark of yours on separable space regarding the importance of the concept for constructivism. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I wonder however whether constructivists need a stricter version of separability: they need to know the countable dense set explicitly and need to have an algorithm which for every element of the space constructs an approximating sequence. For instance, for the real numbers we clearly have such an algorithm approximating with rationals, but I can imagine (actually I can't right now) a situation where I prove that some space must be separable for abstract nonsense reasons, but I can't produce the countable dense set and in particularly I don't know an approximating algorithm. I think the constructivists would be less than enthused.

Yes, they would be -- but this is already dealt with by the principles of intuitionistic logic. Let's write out the separability condition carefully:

There exists a countably indexed set {q₁, q₂, ...} of points in the space X such that, given any point x in X and any neighbourhood U of x, for some index i, q_i belongs to U.

(Here I have snuck in a constructively acceptable definition of "dense".) Although there are many important terms, only 2 points are likely to cause any trouble here:

The countably-indexed size of the dense set. According to the usual terminological conventions in constructive set theory, a set is "countable" iff its in bijective correspondence with one of the sets {}, {0}, {0,1}, {0,1,2}, ..., or N = {0,1,2,3,...}. It is not valid to assume that either a subset or a quotient set of a countable set is countable. For separable spaces, the dense set in question need not be countable, but it must be a quotient set of a countable set -- in more common terminology, it must be countably indexed (thus listable as I've listed it above). So you could find an example of a space with a dense subset Q that is indexed by a subset of a countable set, but not necessarily (in constructive mathematics) by a countable set. Then this space would be separable classically, but not constructively. However, while this is easy enough to set up once you know the tricks, it's unlikely that you'll ever find an example of this "in the field", so to speak -- that is, you're unlikely to find an example that's of interest in topology, rather than cooked up purely for metamathematical purposes. (Even the detail that one must say "countably-indexed" rather than "countable" is contingent on the history of terminology; if I were inventing constructive terminology anew, I probably would not use the words in this way.)
Existential quantification (which appears twice, as "there exists" and "for some"). This is what is at issue in your hypothetical example above. Specifically, if you "can't produce" the countably indexed dense set, then you have not proved the first existential quantification. And if you "don't know an approximating algorithm", then you haven't proved the second existential quantification (the one which constructs an index out of the data of a point and a neighbourhood, as specified in the enclosing universal quantification). In a situation like this, a space may well be classically separable but not constructively so. Still, although I could come up with an example of this using the usual logical tricks, it would have only metamathematical interest; I can't think of any example in the field. Nevertheless, my intution is that such an example is more likely than for point (1).

Rereading the above, I noticed that it may not make any sense. If they had an approximating algorithm for every element of the space, then the space would have to be countable to begin with, as there are only countably many algorithms. AxelBoldt 15:06, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Actually, you want a single algorithm, which takes as data the point x and the neighbourhood U, and returns the index i. It's a fallacy (akin to the Löwenheim-Skolem paradox) to assume that you then have an algorithm for each point, which takes as data U and returns i. Rather, you have such an algorithm for each presentation of a point x. Even if there are uncountably many points, there are still only countably many ways to specify one. (Depending on the context, some people might take issue with the idea that there are only countably many algorithms and only countably many presentions. That is, to the extent that a certain brand of constructivism is described by the words "algorithm" and "presention", these algorithms and presentations might not be limited to finite expressions in a formal language with a countable alphabet -- which is what you're assuming if you believe that there are only countably many of them. But if there are only countably many algorithms, then there are only countably many presentations, and so the paradox disappears in any case.)

-- Toby Bartels 08:17, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Right, thanks, that explains it well. I guess my mistake was to assume that "classically separable spaces" are important for constructivists, but they really only care for "constructivist separable spaces". AxelBoldt 14:50, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Naturally. But it is important (assuming that it's true) that classically separable spaces typically are also constructively separable. Again, it's easy to use what I've called "the usual tricks" to create a classically separable space that can't be proved separable by constructivist methods. But that would not be typical. So there is potentially a matter of some interest here. -- Toby Bartels 22:58, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Mr NH[edit]

Hi, I thought your note to Mr Natural Health was a very good one. Indeed, the coverage of alternative medicine in Wikipedia has probably been set back by this affair. I personally have no particular agenda in that regard -- and I hope that is evident -- I'd simply like to see that particular realm of human knowledge fairly represented here. Anyway, thanks for helping out. -- Viajero 13:42, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Setting back the cause of alternative medicine[edit]

The battle is not over, until it is over. See the current arguments in support of Alternative medicine.--Mr-Natural-Health 07:32, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

oops, that was my old browser :-( -- Anthere

I've had that on a list of things to do for a long time, but I completely forgot! ^_^ -- Toby Bartels 01:15, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)