User talk:WillNess

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Welcome!

Hello, WillNess, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! --4wajzkd02 (talk) 14:37, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

thanks! WillNess (talk) 09:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

December 2009

Please do not add original research or novel syntheses of previously published material to our articles as you apparently did to Avatar (2009 film). Please cite a reliable source for all of your information. Thank you. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 19:49, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

"your" articles? "YOUR"??? Why am I excluded exactly? Sheesh! Demand sources, demand attribution by all means. But saying it is "YOUR ARTICLE"? That's rich. WillNess (talk) 00:19, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I think by 'our articles' he meant Wikipedia's articles, he never said it was his. You did some nice edits on the content I wrote in Roadside Picnic article! Keep up the good work. Cheers! Meishern (talk) 19:29, 8 August 2010 (UTC)Nick

Thank you very much for your words of encouragement! Thank you for the article on Alexander Pechersky too. WillNess (talk) 10:25, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Sieve of Eratosthenes

Hello there! I hope you're well. I can see that you've been very busy editing Sieve of Eratosthenes. It's really good to see an editor with such entuhusiasm. Looking at the article's edit history it seems that you've started to disagree with another editor. It can be very frustrating when that happens. The best thing is to discuss any future changes on the article's talk page. It's best if you try not to conduct creative disagreements on the article itself; keep that to the talk page. I can see that you've already started to engage on the talk page. That's good. Remember that there's the very serious issue of the three revert rule. Please make sure you read the link WP:3RR. It's a policy on Wikipedia that says if you revert an article more than three times in 24 hours then you will be blocked from editing. And no-one wants to see that! So, take a deep breath, relax, and go to the article's talk page. All the best. — Fly by Night (talk) 19:49, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your encouragement and warning. Problem is, the other person refuses to engage in any discussion on the talk page. They just ignore my arguments and do whatever they please - to the detriment of the article's quality IMO.

What can be done in such a case? WillNess (talk) 20:01, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

To keep conversations in one place, I reply to your comments on my own talk page, just so as you know - I'm not ignoring you ... --Matt Westwood 19:09, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

The real problem behind the edit warring

moved here from User_talk:Geometry_guy#The_little_sieve_poem.

There is a real problem lurking beneath all this petty bickering. We do need judges (on WP), but we need them to judge honestly and knowledgeably. We need to know authoritativeness ranks, and objectivity ranks, honesty ranks, etc. Votes cast by people with low specific rank probably do need to be taken into account with less weight. The ranks would of course need to be dynamic, with all the history maintained and rechecked, so if some new evidence comes to light the value would get re-examined and thus always be as close to the true value as possible, according to the knowledge base at a given point in time.

As an aside, that's part of a bigger political theory. We need to be able to vote anytime we want, not only once in four years. We need to be able to recast our votes any time we want, either for our representation or directly on the issues at hand. The system would tally them up and at any given point in time the true will of society would be known and represented. But we need this system also to maintain trust ranks, and knowledgeability ranks, and possibly even honesty ranks, etc. That's like getting likes on a socnet. We certainly value the likes very differently coming from different people, but the system currently assigns an equal weight to each of them. Same approach could be even taken for a true measure of value created by an individual for a society - to be rechecked and revalidated and changed accordingly at any given point in time - to replace money itself. :)

The (dynamic, ever-changing, separately computable on every issue) verifiable trust rank would be eventually formed for each editor, and edits would carry the trust weight of their editors. In disputes, the cumulative trust of opposing parties would play a role. Trust networks could eventually form on certain matters, and a society (on WP, of editors) might split into two (or several) well-formed mutually-trusting sub-societies as pertaining to some issue (there might be several trust ranks for an editor, as rated by/computed from several different mutually-trusting networks of individuals (editors, here)).

Mainly perhaps this would play out on social, not scientific (hopefully) issues. This is what's going on on WP right now anyway, and is cause of much warring, with stronger side winning. But the winner shouldn't be defined by force, if there are two (or more) genuine sub-societies each with its unique POV, both should be represented, possibly by spitting the article.

I realize this appears to fly in the face of NPOV policy, *but* the RS requirements interpretation is / can be / pretty subjective, as we just saw. There is even a school of thought teaching that all knowledge is social. WP tries to pretend that is not the case, but edit wars seem to be evidence to the contrary. The problem is real, as we just observed/participated in a small-scale dispute ourselves.

And both (all) split-parts of the article could be equally well sourced and grounded in RS, just differing in some other aspect, like for the Sieve of Eratosthenes there'd be a minimalist mathematician's take on the matter, and a programmer's take (with much code snippets and more meatier complexity discussion (as it once was)), and child's take on it with more visual aids, etc. etc. A reader would choose a "reader mode" from a menu, and see the corresponding version. And if there's a well-formed minority on some article whose opinion gets always trampled, they'd finally be able to have their voice and their case shown to the general readership.

Of course if their "product" i.e. the page-version would be demonstrably false, or flagrantly ignoring well-established RS and using flaky ones instead on a consistent basis, there should be a mechanism for such article-version to be graded (by whom??) appropriately and all its editors get their share of negative grading (by whose trust network??) subsumed into their trust history. (the grading process could play part in trust networks-discovery) And grades from higher-ranking editors would carry more weight too, just like links from higher-ranking web pages carry more weight in Google PageRank discovery mechanism. Maybe each our editing action, on articles and talk pages etc., would get a little "trust/mistrust" button near it, or something like that.

This is all still a very vague idea that I have. WillNess (talk) 12:18, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

My comment: Deletionists suck. Always. --Matt Westwood 18:10, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Edits to prime number

Hi, thanks for proposing a compromise at Prime number. Nevertheless I've undone your edit, because I think it isn't necessary now. PeggyCummins/Rebecca G have been blocked for sockpuppetry–they are apparently the same person–so hopefully there will be no more edit warring on this page. Best wishes, Jowa fan (talk) 23:43, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

I suspected as much. WillNess (talk) 11:08, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Counting sort comment

First, I am sorry that I messed up this page. I quickly realized that I was wrong (after David Epstein fixed it). However, I did not do a second wrong edit attempt: it was another person (i.e., you may want to explain this to her/him).

Nonetheless, if we talking about the counting sort and how to prevent these erroneous edits in the future. Please, note that the version with the plus is the stable version. IMHO, it should be highlighted (in a comment or otherwise). Second, I suggest to add some comment that explains the differences between versions that use PLUS and MINUS. Then, people would not change this code.

Finally, as I noted on my wikipage and, because Wikipedia has such a messy way of communicating, I prefer to discuss such matter via e-mail. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Itman (talk • contribs) 17:18, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I think both versions are stable. The difference is in insignificant detail of final traversal direction, and corresponding prefix sum entries calculation. -- WillNess (talk) 10:59, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Track Geomtry

Thanks for your input, I think I am seeing where I was getting confused by trying to explain it :).

In respect of some comments you made off-wiki , the following may be of interest to you in a different capacity: [1], It's a set of various notes issued by GWR/BR Western Region on various matters involving railway track geometry. There is also according to a railway modelling contact apparently a semi-official BR/Railtrack manual for track geometry on curves and so on, but for understandable reasons that's not an easily accessible 'online' document. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 00:43, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm replying here to the RefDesk thread coz I think we're not talking math anymore here. If I'm in error, please move these my comments back there. Thanks. WillNess (talk) 08:24, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

This is strange. Perhaps some low-grade software. Why trace arcs with chords? Maybe you get some low-resolution picture and are trying to magnify it? Because if you worked in same level of zoom, there wouldn't be reason for what you want to do presumably. So what you want is to recover the true layout from its broken representation it seems.

For one chord on an arc, that arc can be recovered by your slide function. But if you have two parallel tracks alongside that chord, slide that is done according to the center-line will introduce tears at vertex points (because it works perpendicularly to the chord), and won't recover those arcs properly (introduce distortions, also because it works according to the main radius). My function would introduce tears at the side track's vertex points too, for its own reasons, and it's not bend because the amount of rotation is different at edges than in the middle point (where it is zero).

You could perform slide for each chord according to its own arc. That means point A having non-zero x and z at the outset, unless you perform a temporary translation before applying the slide, and then translate the results back. And maybe it even means point B having a different x than that of A?

But why do you want to trace your arcs by a bunch of points in the first place? Don't you have arc primitive in your software? If so, you could recover the true arc's parameters and create this arc with a call to the built-in arc primitive. Or is it the same software without arcs that you're trying to improve the picture inside?

Another case is transitional curves. These are sometimes traced by a sequence of chords (i.e. just calculating a bunch of points along them). Then what you're recovering is not an arc. Is this the case you're working on? Or one of the cases? And how come you only have horizontal chords?? No diagonal ones at all? As for your rectangles drawing, yes, kind of, but wouldn't you prefer to have your new curved tracks run in parallel to the center-line? -- WillNess (talk) 08:24, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I guess I'm just bad at giving explanations it seems.

1. I'm well aware of the 'vertex' breaks that would occur with 'slide'.
2. The reason I am 'approxmating' the true arc with 'chords' is so I have 'vertex' data which I can combine with appropriate height values to actually generate rails and so on. When creating a cylinder as a 3D object, it's typically approximated as a many sided prism , but with suitably adjusted normals so that it's shaded to appear truly cylinderical.
3. The transitional curve case is NOT what I was considering at present, given that I was wanting to generate curves of a known radius in the first instance.

Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

This was the code I worked out for 'bend'.

      DIM point{x,y}
      :
      DEFPROCbend(RETURN q{},r)
      DIM p{}=point{} LOCAL
      p.x= q.0
      p.z= q.z
      REM Calculate b here
      PROCrotateQaboutP(q{},p{},b)
      DIM n{}=point() LOCAL
      PROCtranslationofCL(n{},p{},r)
      q.x= q.x+n.x
      q.z= p.z+n.z
      ENDPROC
      :
      DEF PROCtranslationofCL(RETURN n{}, p{},r)
      DIM p`{}=point{} LOCAL
      p`.x=p.x
      p`.y=p.y
      PROCcltranslate(p`{},r)
      n.x=p`.z.-p.x
      n.z=p`.x-p.z
      ENDPROC
      :
      DEF PROCrotateQaboutP(RETURN q{},p{},t)
      c==COS(t)
      s=SIN(t)
      p.Z = o.Z + ( (COS(t) * (p.X - o.Z)) - (SIN(t) * (p.X - o.X)) )
      p.X = o.X + ( (SIN(t) * (p.Z - o.Z)) + (COS(t) * (p.X - o.X)) )
      ENDPROC
      :
      DEF PROCcltranslate(RETURN p{},r)
      IF p.z<(l/2)   l'=   2*(p.z)
      IF p.z>(l/2)   l'=   2*(l-p.z)
      oz=(l-l`)/2
      ox=SQR((r*r)-(oz*oz)
      t=(ASN(oz/r))
      IF p.z<=(l/2)  t=-t
      p.x=ox-r*cos(t)
      p.z=oz+r*sin(t)
      ENDPROC

This code is still incomplete as the angle I've called b is not actually setup :(. Also given my apparent inability to explain things clearly, this code is probably wrong in a number of ways. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 14:44, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Logically it should also be possible to have a 'slide' procedure. 'slide' would seem to be some kind of shear function? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 14:57, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

In regrads to 'slide' - File:Curves P Slide Soloution.svg . Note although it would by viewing it that the angle at P_bend is a right angle it isn't. 'Solving' this triangle would yield what I need to do work out P_slide ? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:14, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Well if you just want a slide function to retrieve the arc based on its chord, assuming the chord is horizontal, running from x=0, z=0 to x=0, z=ZB, and you want to slide some (z,x) point to its "on-arc" position (z staying the same, obviously),

 O_x = sqrt( R^2 - (ZB/2)^2 )     // pre-calculate this value
 
 def slide (x,z) = 
      new_x := sqrt( R^2 - (ZB/2 - z)^2 ) - O_x + x
      return (new_x, z)

Bend, I'm lost for. WillNess (talk) 22:16, 16 December 2011 (UTC)