User talk:Peter Mercator

mid-height dot

May I just say that the use of a mid-height dot for the decimal point was traditionally taught in British schools. It preserves the distinction between the decimal point and the full stop, a distinction which helps when a decimal number occurs at the end of a sentence. I would certainly raise the decimal points in handwritten work. The use of the same symbol for both is laziness in English although normal in, say, German. Furthermore, the distinction of phi and varphi is a matter of taste, not of substance. I simply preferred to use phi in my major rewrite of this article since I find varphi rather inelegant. Neither of these edits added to the content of the article but I shall not trouble to undo them. Peter Mercator (talk) 16:33, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

The use of the middot as a decimal point fails to preserve the distinction between that and the other frequent use of the middot for multiplication. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:47, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I've raised this issue more publicly

See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#decimal_points.2C_full_stops.2C_and_commas. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:46, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

re: Draft for flattening

Hi, Peter Mercator. I noticed that your draft article was showing up in Category:Geophysics, among other categories. It shouldn't (see WP:USERNOCAT), so I put a colon in front of each category to suppress the listing. You can undo this when you are ready to promote the article to mainspace. RockMagnetist (talk) 21:52, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I notice that your other drafts have the same problem. Could you fix them please? RockMagnetist (talk) 21:54, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorted, I hope. Peter Mercator (talk) 21:58, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, at least the flattening one is sorted. I have never added a geophysics category to any article. I think they were all there when I copy pasted the articles into my user space as drafts. Happy if you take action on the various main pages.   Peter Mercator (talk) 22:03, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I have now read WP:USERNOCAT and I will take action on present pages and be more careful in the furture!  Peter Mercator (talk) 22:10, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I have been guilty of the same mistake! RockMagnetist (talk) 22:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Gnomic --> Mercator

Hello Peter, My compliments for your Mercator article. At the moment I'm working on an article about great-circle navigation on the Dutch WP: Grootcirkelnavigatie. For that I was lookong on Commons for something that compares to this picture (from Bowditch). The closest is your drawing File:Equirectangular with rhumb+circle+triangle.svg. Are you able to produce a drawing like my example, or otherwise, can you tell me what software you used? Regards, BoH (talk) 15:17, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your compliment: I haven't had the courage to replace the present article on Mercator with this draft. I produce my figures using the free software Inkscape and they are easily modified. They are schematic in the sense that I did not plot accurate curves: for that I would have use the gnuplot package which is also free but more difficult to use. However I am not sure what you are trying to do. If you simply want to use the Bowditch drawings you could upload them to commons as they stand. Do you want both drawings or just the Mercator one? I could possibly do both if I had the data points shown on the Bowditch maps. Do you want an example from the Pacific or the Atlantic. Come back with more details.  Peter Mercator (talk) 18:03, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

I use Inkscape myself, so I will see if I can download gnuplot and have a go at it myself.

And please do not hesitate; I think it would be a loss for Wikipedia if you did not replace the current article!

Thanks! BoH (talk) 12:55, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

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Hi

Hi, I am amazed by the work you are doing in the article on the Mercator 1569 map. I have a passion for old maps too (see [1]) and hope we can collaborate in the future. I may be of help in adapting your article to Wikipedia:Manual of Style and to the conventions and policies of Wikipedia and general, if you wish. Best, --Hispalois (talk) 06:35, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Gerard Mercator

Gerard Mercator, Jardin du Petit Sablon, Brussels

I know you will be pleased with this photograph! Taken during the weekend, in Brussels, after the conference. Best wishes, Alvesgaspar (talk) 18:23, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Excellent contributions

As a spin-off from other activities I have recently had to acquaint myself with some topics from geodesy such as the geodesic problem on reference ellipsoids such as WGS 84. I have noticed some of the brush-ups you have made to the articles within this subject area. Especially with new high quality figures and illustrations. The are very educational and concise with good notation and nice consistent graphics. I just wanted to say thanks for your efforts, and that it is appreciated. I enjoy making good figures myself, but also find it very time-consuming, and I am not yet retired :-) I have reused some of your figures (with proper attribution and licensing of course) on a corporate wiki for illustrating some aspects about how to convert distances to geographic points on the surface of the earth and for illustrating the basic geometrical concepts in these operations, like the auxiliary sphere, reduced latitude, geographical latitude, etc.... the figures say more than many words. Thanks again. --Slaunger (talk) 13:43, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I see above that they have been created using InkScape. Also my preferred tool for such kinds of figures, and the svg files are easy to tweak for other purposes in derivative works. --Slaunger (talk) 13:46, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Material for you, urgent

I have something on Mercator and portolans here and the famous Mercator letter linked with 1569 map here. I just completed my portolan pages. Unfortunately today the discussion started to delete them all. Better you save what you need. Who can help? -- Portolanero (talk) 20:10, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:04, 24 November 2015 (UTC) ArbCom elections are now open! Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:11, 24 November 2015 (UTC) Speedy deletion nomination of Franciscus Monachus Hello Peter Mercator, I wanted to let you know that I just tagged Franciscus Monachus for deletion, because it seems to be inappropriate for a variety of reasons. If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top. You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:52, 19 January 2016 (UTC) Because people often start an article and then abandon it, and because we do not want readers of the encyclopedia to come upon empty or "watch this space" pages, articles with no content may be speedily deleted. As this one looks as though it's going somewhere, I have instead "userfied" it - moved it to User:Peter Mercator/Franciscus Monachus where you can work on it. When it is ready, you can either click the blue "Submit" button to send it for review to WP:Articles for creation, or move it directly to the main encyclopedia. In the latter case, you will need to remove the <!-- --> comment tags I have put around the categories. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 11:10, 19 January 2016 (UTC) JohnCD I had rather hoped that I had left enough as a stub to encourage someone else to work it up! I am very busy with a major rewrite of Gerardus Mercator where I have already linked to Monachus! Peter Mercator (talk) 11:54, 19 January 2016 (UTC) There was no text there at all - nothing but the stub template and the categories! You need to give others something to get their teeth into. The new one is fine from that point of view. I have deleted the userfied stub as no longer required. JohnCD (talk) 20:11, 19 January 2016 (UTC) February 2016 Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Gerardus Mercator may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page. It's OK to remove this message. 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