User talk:Urhixidur/Archive/2005

Archive of 2005 Talk

Hello - I put some comments on the Sun discussion page.

Image:Orbits-OrbitalParameters-001.PNG

Just curious - why did ju add {{GFDL}} to this image? Is it sanctioned by current Wikipedia policies in any way? (Your comments about symbols are OK BTW)0.39 15:13, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Being the image's uploader, you should know. If the image is not public domain (or GFDL or some such similar), it will have to be tagged for deletion. If I put the wrong tag on, please do fix it. As for the symbol comments, I really should have put them in the image's Talk page, not in its description.

Urhixidur 16:10, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)

Elara

Hi, A user added an image to the Elara (moon) page. I reverted because I can't find this image on the NASA website (the supposed source), and it looks excessively spherical for a small satellite. This image also appears on the Dutch and Japanese Wikipedia pages and in Wikipedia Commons. Can you check this out? -- Curps 21:52, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The user has supplied a source http://www.vesmirweb.net/galerie.php?adresar=mesice but I'm still skeptical. There's a supposed image of Lysithea (moon) too, which is also very spherical. -- Curps 22:27, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I asked for information at Wikipedia:Peer_review#Elara_.28moon.29 -- Curps 22:30, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The image of "Lysithea" is really Dione:

• http://www.vesmirweb.net/galerie/mesice/lysithea.jpg
• http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/images/full/saturn/dione.jpg

There's also a nonsensical image of "Sinope" at http://www.vesmirweb.net/clanek.php?id=44#13

I still don't know what the "Elara" image really shows... any idea? Perhaps Rhea or Oberon? -- Curps 23:43, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Elara has never been visited by spacecraft, so the only pictures we have show a blurry dot.

Urhixidur 23:49, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

The Elara image looks synthetic, maybe a view of Venus without the clouds? The Sinope one first looked like a bad Moon shot (through clouds), but may be a mangled Mars image?

Urhixidur 00:00, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

Found it... it's an image of Io.

• http://www.xtec.es/recursos/astronom/galileo/io/io9495.jpg

-- Curps 00:45, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Taken by Hubble. Makes sense. Now for the "Sinope" image...

Urhixidur 03:07, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

I think it must be the Moon, taken under unusual circumstances (lunar eclipse? non-optical image?). I sent e-mail to the webmaster of vesmirweb.net. We don't really need to care about proving the origin of the Sinope image, it hasn't been uploaded to Wikipedia. -- Curps 04:22, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Found it. See [1], about two-thirds of the way down. If you turn it clockwise 120 degrees and then mirror it right-left, it is uncanny similar --although the original for "Lysithea" probably came from the other end of the eclipse, judging by the light gradient.

Urhixidur 01:48, 2005 Apr 5 (UTC)

Thanks for the note about the lunar eclipse photo. I guess that's the final footnote on that odd episode. Back in January, I sent the original website vesmirweb.net a note about the fake photos and they removed them. -- Curps 08:25, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pluto in astrology

It was recreated by the same anonymous IP.

However, the other planets have astrology sections too. So I'd suggest maybe creating a Planets in astrology page and moving each planet's "X in astrology" section to there, as one big article. And just substitute {{main|Planets in astrology}} in each planet page. -- Curps 23:26, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Although both Robert Happelberg and ShutterBugTrekker state that they don't even believe in astrology (!), they are going to great lengths to add and keep a paragraph on astrology in the main planet articles. For me, this is not worth an edit war, at least if it's a small section. If it ever gets bigger then a separate article can be created like Mars in fiction. It's not ideal but Wikipedia involves compromise and obviously some not so small number of people have some interest in astrology. C'est la vie. -- Curps 21:59, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

regarding wrongtitle

This template is a recent invention, added by people who are not acquainted with how Croatian names are commonly represented in English-language texts. Even if we could use the "ć" in the titles, it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea because in most other English texts they're always dropped. Please follow the de facto consensus (witnessed over the last few years) and leave the names as they are, and drop the pointless template (the first, bolded instance in the text, as well as all others, are written with the acute, so the template has little or no practical value). --Joy [shallot] 01:15, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I see the template as one little thing pushing en.wikipedia to go to full Unicode like the other wikipedias. It is true that it adds nothing to the article itself --but then it doesn't detract much either. Do you feel it bothers you? I hope you're not perceiving it as some kind of slur or attack on "foreign" names --being myself French Canadian, I do see value in using diacritics as much as possible.

No, it's merely annoying to see another reminder about this on top of the page. It's rather pointless to rub it in this way :) Note that the same technical difficulties apply not only to Wikipedia but elsewhere, so English speakers in a way expect to see the version without the diacritics, they would search without it. It seems reasonable to present them with that version first, and then gracefully introduce the diacritics in the article text without much explication. --Joy [shallot]

Maybe we could substitute a "silent" version of the template that does not change the article but does log the "request to evolve to full Unicode" under some page --a template consisting of a category would do the job nicely. Say, "Category:Unicode title desirable"?

Urhixidur 04:33, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

That would be less intrusive. Although, it's also extra, given that you can one day have a bot trawl through Category:Croatian people visiting all articles and comparing $title with the first bolded words in them. --Joy [shallot] 11:38, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well, now that en.wikipedia has finally gone Unicode, this whole issue is moot. Welcome to the twenty-first century, English Wikipedia.

Urhixidur 14:55, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Polydeuces and S/2004 S6

From the rough translatiuon of the Norwegian page I got online, I'd be rather confident in saying that the source of the Norwegian page doesn't say that S/2004 S6 and Polydeuces are near each other. They weren't mentioned in the same paragraphs. Polydeuces was given the provisional distance and mentions of Tethys and Dione, plus they said that it was about 5 km in diameter. They didn't repeat any of these when talking about S/2004 S6, just mentioning a similar situation to S/2004 S3 and S4, as being possibly clumps of F Ring material. I could be wrong, but if you want, I could post here what the translation I found said. This would be so much easier if someone who asctually spoke Norwegian or Czech could translate for us. :P --Patteroast 20:51, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It'd be better to post it in Talk:Polydeuces (moon). I've left requests for help at [2] (Czech Village Pump) and [3] (Norwegian Village Pump).

Urhixidur 21:54, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

I have posted a translation of the Norwegian text. –Peter J. Acklam 23:08, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Including values for zebi- and yobi-: sure, fine.

Sure, that's fine. Good idea. I'm happy as long as it's crystal clear that these are hypothetical continuations of the sequence, and are not terms that are in real use or actually have been approved by a standards organization. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:00, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I thought that was already made abundantly clear by the article. My main objection was having the values (which are not easily computed using width-limited means such as Excel or a calculator) deleted. One could put them back in the table with a header line to emphasize their status, like so:

Symbol	Name	Meaning	Value
Ki	kibi-	binary kilo	210	=  10001 × 1.024
Mi	mebi-	binary mega	220	=  10002 × 1.048 576
Gi	gibi-	binary giga	230	=  10003 × 1.073 741 824
Ti	tebi-	binary tera	240	=  10004 × 1.099 511 627 776
Pi	pebi-	binary peta	250	=  10005 × 1.125 899 906 842 624
Ei	exbi-	binary exa	260	=  10006 × 1.152 921 504 606 846 976
Unofficial extensions
Zi	zebi-	binary zetta	270	=  10007 × 1.180 591 620 717 411 303 424
Yi	yobi-	binary yotta	280	=  10008 × 1.208 925 819 614 629 174 706 176

What do you think?

Urhixidur 12:33, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)

Astronomical unit

Hi, can you cite the sources you used in ascribing mean distances from the Sun to different astronomical objects (article: astronomical unit)? Thanks. Eleassar777 19:54, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The wiki orbital data entries for the planets come from the JPL pages; those for the asteroids (e.g. 90377 Sedna) are from the Lowell Observatory Asteroid Data Services.

Urhixidur 03:33, 2005 Feb 4 (UTC)

New named asteroids

Where do you get the list of newly-named asteroids? I'm updating the "Meaning of asteroid names" pages, right now by going through your "User contributions" page and seeing what changes you made to the "List of asteroids" pages. I know I've seen the list on the web before, but I foolishly didn't bookmark, and I have so far failed to determine the right set of Google search terms to bring it up. Is there an easy link you can share with me, or do you just have a subscription to the Minor Planet Circular? Alfvaen 02:50, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

I run a small Java program on the astorb.dat which I download now and then from the Lowell Observatory Asteroid Data Services (see link in discussion above); it compares the newly downloaded astorb.dat name fields with the previous version and reports changes. This method is a tad slower than watching the MPCs (I wish I had a subscription!), but it does update decently quickly. I simultaneously watch Astronomisches Rechen-Institut for the diacriticals in the said names, using a Word macro that filters them out of the mass (hence the Diacriticals.txt file used by my AstOrb browser).

Urhixidur 14:34, 2005 Feb 27 (UTC)

Now that Schmadel's page listed above seems gone, I rely on the Russian Institute of Applied Astronomy pages instead.

Urhixidur 14:58, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Asteroid pronunciation guides

Sure, I can make a new list. Back in August I started putting the pronunciations in the individual articles, but most of them were targeted for Speedy Deletion because all they were were the name.

I didn't realize the lists were interlingual.

kwami

There is certainly no problem in adding the pronunciation to existing asteroid articles, such as 1 Ceres. You mean you had created asteroid articles with just the pronunciation in the text (which should not be deleted), or that you had created separate articles about just the asteroid name pronunciation (which I can understand being deleted)? Grouping the "orphans" in a list seems a good approach, in my mind.

And, no, the lists aren't interlingual as such, it's just that they're very close to being so, and it would be nice to keep them that way...Copying them over to fr.wikipedia (for example) seems almost a waste of disk space. I'll have to ask over on commons if they can't figure a way to store data tables without the headers.

Urhixidur 13:38, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)

Yes, I had created stubs that contained nothing but the pronunciations, and they were deleted. Now I've created a series of pages on asteroid pronunciation linked to the main article. Since you keep a spread sheet of the asteroid lists, it might be easier for you to reload the 1-1000 list rather than me deleting the pronunciations one by one. I'll just add a note saying the info has been moved.

There have been a few additions since I started the list, so someone else is contributing. By the way, how do you pronounce 'Urhixidur' in English? kwami

Being a French speaker first, I wouldn't know.  :-) Let me try a translitteration: "Your hicks seed oor" is how I would pronounce it in English conversation. Maybe "Yur hicks seed ur" would be closer. French is easier, since there is only rarely any possible ambiguity; it is pronounced as it is spelled. What we really need to know is: How do the Germans pronounce it?

Urhixidur 02:03, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)

Adjectival forms of celestial body names

Glad to see you're using some of the adjectival forms of the moons. I didn't know if anyone would care, or if they'd get deleted, but after seeing the problems with Mimas, thought it would be a good idea to include them in case they were ever needed. Still a ways to go, though. kwami 10:32, 2005 July 17 (UTC)

They're certainly words worth saving from obscurity. You've looked at the (controversial) specialised names for apoapsis and periapsis (i.e. perizene, apokrone, etc.)?

Urhixidur 13:48, 2005 July 17 (UTC)

Hi again. I've been nominated for admin, and was wondering if that were something you'd support: Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Kwamikagami.

The apsis names are nice to document too. Where else are you going to find this kind of thing? We really don't bother with avoiding Latin-Greek compounds any more, but having a variety of terms will allow for specialized use later on. I'm not sure I follow the suggested use of -selene, -cynthion, -lune, however. Maybe a few more words would disambiguate? kwami 00:35, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Done, I think...

Urhixidur 00:50, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! kwami 07:04, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Mars

I have nominated the Mars article for Featured article status, however there are a lack of references in the article, which is part of the opposition to it being promoted. I saw your name in the history and was wondering what reference books could be added into the article, or at least webpages and the date of retrival. See the objections at: WP:FAC. -- AllyUnion (talk) 20:04, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Lars Olsen

Can you help investigate this possible hoax: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Lars Olsen. Thanks. -- Curps 22:16, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Star names: changing from traditional to Bayer?

I've been looking at:

• List of traditional star names
• List of brightest stars
• List of stars by constellation

I think too many stars have an article under their traditional name, which is not the most common name. For instance the article on δ Sco is at Dschubba, which is not a name that's familiar to most people. When Sky and Telescope did an article about its flareup, they called it Delta Scorpii.

Looking at list of brightest stars, I'd say only the stars on that list brighter than Castor should have articles with their traditional name as page title, but maybe omitting Adhara, Hadar, Becrux which are probably better known under their Bayer names. For anything fainter, there would be a small set of exceptions: Polaris, Mira, Algol, Mizar, maybe Bellatrix, maybe Albireo, maybe Denebola, but the rest would be titled by their Bayer names.

For many of the other traditional names, not only are they relatively obscure, but there are many variant spellings and names, as can be seen from List of traditional star names. Really, a traditional name should only be used as a page title when popular science literature uses it almost exclusively and unhesitatingly (Sky and Telescope would never write a headline about Alpha Canis Majoris, for instance).

All of this would be in keeping with Wikipedia's policy on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names).

What do you think?

-- Curps 19:11, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. It doesn't affect content much, thanks to the redirects...

Urhixidur 00:01, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

• I think that they should all be listed by Bayer Designation, but with redirects for any Proper Names anyone might use. (BTW, I call Beta Crucis "Mimosa.")

B00P 03:57, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Asteroid names

Hello Urhixidur! Great work with the Meanings of asteroid names. But as you're adding the later ones (30,000 on) I'm just wondering whether there's any point in dividing each list into sections any more. There are so few named asteroids after 30,000 that it might be simpler to present each 1,000 asteroid block as a single list without breaking each one down further into sections. What do you think? It might save you some time. The Singing Badger 03:12, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

He's got a point. In the future, most asteroids will never get names, due to the restrictions that were put into place on how many names are allowed per discoverer in any given time period (no more than two names every two months). [4] -- Curps 04:47, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Just in case, I think the best approach for now would be to comment out the empty sections.

Urhixidur 00:50, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)

Smart plan. The Singing Badger 01:26, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

List of acronyms and initialisms

Why are you splitting this page up? -- Netoholic @ 20:17, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)

Because it is over 180 Kib in size, way over the suggested 32 Kib limit. Any alternatives to suggest?

Urhixidur 04:51, 2005 Mar 23 (UTC)

Diacriticals

Hi, I saw you moved some articles, such as Harlau (Hârlău) to Hârlau. I think that until the diacritical problem would be fixed, it would be better to let them without any diacriticals, than put only some of the diacriticals. Bogdan | Talk 21:19, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

As meta:Help:Special_characters#ISO-8859-1 Characters shows, any ISO-8859-1 character is safe for use within a Wikipedia title. Later, when en.wikipedia catches up to Unicode like the rest of the wikipedias, we'll only need to follow the links into the titlelacksdiacritics template (and a few others like it) to find and fix 'em. For now, we put in all the safe characters.

Urhixidur 21:26, 2005 Mar 23 (UTC)

Hi, I am unhappy that you whacked the article Erdös-Borwein constant. It works perfectly fine with the diacriticals in the title, and whatever bug may been in the wikimedia software seems to have been fixed a long time ago. So I don't understand the problem. If this is a windows-98 browser problem, then that's foolish; something like 1/4 of the world uses win98 and it will be more than a decade before win98 disappears. I don't think its right for wikipedia to wait for the users of win98 to die of old age before starting to use diacriticals. (Anyway, the math articles have far far more serious problems than a few diacriticals here or there.)linas 15:44, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Nice try, but you're going down the wrong track. The (minor) problem with the title is that substituting an o-umlaut for an o-double-acute is an error, plain and simple. When en.wikipedia goes Unicode, we'll be able to put the o-double-acute in properly, but in the meantime the Wikipedia policy is to drop to the unadorned ISO 8859-1 character within titles. Since all references from within articles read [[Erdos-Borwein constant|Erdős-Borwein constant]] anyway, the only thing affected is the title itself. I hope this clears up the issue.

Urhixidur 17:09, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)

Meḋḃ

I see you (half-) changed my WrongTitle for article Medb to remove the [math] notation. I guessed you meant also to change the template to TitleLacksDiacritics. Using either template, the text fails to render. Whereas TitleLacksDiacritics correctly renders some of the Irish dotted consonants (such as c-dot, ċ), it can't handle the four digit ones like ḋ. So please leave the article as it is (accepting that it is a bodge) until you can correct TitleLacksDiacritics to be more generic. Or better still, make a new template TitleNeedsUnicode? -Red King 00:11, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The problem is user-local; it is a matter of which Unicode fonts one has installed. My systems render the characters without any problem. A quick check reveals the following fonts have the required Latin Extended Additional Unicode support: Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, Microsoft Sans Serif, Palatino Linotype, Tahoma.

By the way, I did not create the Template:Titlelacksdiacritics. In my mind, "lacks diacritics" and "needs Unicode" is the same thing.

Urhixidur 15:25, 2005 Apr 4 (UTC)

I've changed Template:Titlelacksdiacritics so it internally invokes the Template:Unicode. Does this fix the problem you had?

Urhixidur 15:39, 2005 Apr 4 (UTC)

Excellent! Yes, that hits the spot! Thank you. (btw, this proves it wasn't "user local", but I suspect you worked that out. But in general, only Windows 2000 or later and (I think) MaxOS-X or later support Unicode properly.) --Red King 22:24, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Flag of Monaco

My source was [5], which reads: "Use: on land, national and civil flag, at sea, national and civil ensign". — Dan | Talk 16:10, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Shape of Earth

It is a good thing that you want to fix the shape calculation, but the numbers still aren't correct. See Talk:Earth#Shape. Dragons flight 03:51, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Maximum deviation from geoid 10.911 km, average radius 6,371.01 km. Ratio is 584. How else would you compute the tolerance?

Urhixidur 15:07, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC)

I didn't notice that you were refering to deviations from the geoid (as opposed to deviations from a sphere, which is what previous versions had). For my part, I would think that what people would be looking for in a discussion of the Earth's shape would be the difference between it and a sphere, in which case the dominant term would be the ~40 kms of bulge. Also, if one is talking about the maximum deviation from geoid wouldn't you only go in one direction (in this case down). I'm not sure it makes a great deal of sense to look at the deviation from local sea level of two different points on the Earth, add them together, and use that to describe some notion of the tolerance.

I further misread your comment in the article, since you mention both Everest and Mariana in the article, I had assumed you had combined both, rather than just taking the larger (the article itself doesn't make that clear). Assumming it is not just my brain being flaky, the text of the article at least needs to be clarified about what you mean by "tolerance". Dragons flight 20:01, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Your calculation is straightforward, from easily computed from available information, but I would also think the average (or RMS) deviation from geoid would potentially be more interesting. Not sure where to get the relevant data for that though. Dragons flight 19:44, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not the one who originally put the "smoothness" bit in; I'm just fixing the figures (the original text was using the diametre instead of the radius).

Urhixidur 20:10, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC)

The tolerance (engineering) article defines the tolerance as the largest departure from the nominal value which is still "acceptable". Inverting the definition gives the calculation above --if you define your ellipsoid to a stricter tolerance than 1:584, then Earth doesn't fit it.

Urhixidur 20:16, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC)

Diacritics

Why are you changing the {{wrongtitle}} template to {{titlelacksdiacritics}}? The new template is not only fuzzy, but it's also less accurate. The most accurate to say that would be that "the title is incorrect because it lacks diacritics". Halibutt 08:49, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Funny, I thought it was *more* accurate! It distinguishes those titles which lack diacritics because en.wikipedia is not Unicode yet (and thus would be fine under another language wikipedia) from those that are "wrong" because of HTTP limitations (embedded plus signs, for example) or because of wikipedia's automatic case changes (lower case initial letter) --those titles would remain incorrect under another language wikipedia. You can certainly word-smith the template if you feel it is misleading.

Urhixidur 15:03, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC)

Tomas Bata University in Zlín

I think Tomas Bata University in Zlín is the official international name. See university web page, google search (fight), and [6]:

• page 2, Název pro mezinárodní styk: Tomas Bata University in Zlín (Name for international contact)
• page 18, Insignie, rectorial (chancello's) sceptre (mace,truncheon), has notice: ERUDIRE ET CREARE, UNIVERZITA TOMÁSE BATI VE ZLÍNĚ, TOMAS BATA UNIVERSITY IN ZLIN see photograph

Please revert your changes. For other Czech universities correct names see List of universities in the Czech Republic. I verify names with universities status documents. --Michal Jurosz 12:04, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for setting me straight. I notice the document quoted uses both "Univerzita Tomáse Bati ve Zlíně" and "Univerzity Tomáse Bati ve Zlíně" --is that a typo or what?

Urhixidur 13:08, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)

Thanks for your work. No typo, but Czech grammar. See Czech_language#Declension. --Michal Jurosz 20:11, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Image:Andorra flag large.png

What was the source of that image? In the image description it says that the flag was fixed with info from the World Flag Database. However, you do not say where you got it from. David Newton 21:16, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If memory serves, it would have been whatever the pre-existing image was. It is odd that there is no previous history showing now. I can't be absolutely sure after all these months, but I thought there was an image before I uploaded that one. The ultimate source is the CIA World Factbook, as a quick comparison makes obvious. I distinctly remember spending some time fixing that image up (the coat of arms details), starting with the hues.

Urhixidur 21:28, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

Meanings of asteroid names (3001-3500)

OK, I will now, thanks for telling me. The nearby names though were not augmented with such references hence I had no idea that this is the intended style. Maybe, some text encouraging such references should be placed near the same explanation that talks about the "*" marking meaning? Also, when there is a wiki-link to an article on the subject (as with Nadya Rusheva, for example), do you still think the reference should better be placed on the "Meanings ..." page, rather than on the subject article? BACbKA 20:26, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

My problem is distinguishing the "Schmadel-certified" meanings from guesses (marked with an asterisk) and from those independently established (through MPEC citations, usually). As for placing the reference, I would repeat it: once in the Meanings, once in the article. Thanks for your understanding.

Urhixidur 23:53, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)

Probably, it's a good idea to make the intro (with the * and the thing) a template, rather than have to maintain the same text on tens of pages? BACbKA 23:57, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I was coming to the same conclusion. Note, however, that the pages up to 1500-2000 will need a different template disclaimer because they can take advantage of Herget's book too.

Urhixidur 00:01, 2005 Apr 23 (UTC)

Nuclear fusion exceptions?

I am thinking of two things. One is that the curve of binding energy is not smooth. ⁴He is more tightly bound than some heavier elements, so you can't fuse it into ⁸Be, for example. The other thing is that if you fuse two nuclei of the same isotope, you get a nuclei that is twice as heavy, not just a tad heavier. If you try to fuse two isotopes a touch lighter than iron, you will land so far on the other side of the hill that you will not release any energy. The same thing happens if you try to fission an isotope a little heavier than iron. Do we need to explain that in the article? Art Carlson 20:35, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I understand now. There are indeed combos that will "overshoot" across the iron trough. I'll see what I can wordsmith about this.

Urhixidur 23:49, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)

fr:Observation du ciel

Alors, vous recommendez que l'on traduise fr:observation du ciel? Cela me donnerait un bon boulot. En addition, ca m'emmerde quand les francophones ont une article tellement meilleur que nous :-). Un jour je vais écrire plus pour wikipédia france, je promets. Repondez-vous ici si vous voulez. --Wonderfool t(c)e) 22:55, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Duplicate Articles

Please see my note under the heading ==Duplicate Articles== at Talk:Robert Burnham, Jr. --DannyZ 05:19, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

"Be aggressive", policy says. Merge is done, deletion done, redirects fixed. Even 3467 Bernheim is now properly categorised and linked into the asteroid navigation bar.

Urhixidur 14:49, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

Thanks for taking care of the merge. --DannyZ 01:15, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

ICRS fixup

Thanks for fixing the name from "frame" to "system" - I think I had jumped from a relativity page and messed up the acronym relationship. Of course, it might more properly be called a reference frame since who cares if you use polar coordinates (and these in degrees or radians?) or unit vectors or quaternions - but gotts follow IAU. Pdn 11:15, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

gerund (body's)

Thanks for fixing up "Two body"->two body. I had just copied from the relevant page. But the other change was wrong. For example, one says or writes: "In spite of his being late, we got done in time." not "In spite of him being late, we got done in time.", and "Mark Twain's caricaturing of racial prejudice left its mark on society." not "Mark Twain caricaturing of racial prejudice left its mark on society." Pdn 03:23, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

The ref is Kepler's laws of planetary motion#Applicability.

You prefer: « Then Kepler's laws apply to that system without the restriction of one body's being "light". » The problem with that sentence is the possessive. One body's what? Mass? If the « quality of being light », then the possessive is pointless, which is why I removed it earlier. Please explain.

Urhixidur 12:17, 2005 May 17 (UTC)

Reversion of Robert Burnham, Jr. article

Please see my note under the heading ==Category Astronomy== at Talk:Robert Burnham, Jr.. Thanks --DannyZ 00:06, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Renaming of Bureau international des poids et mesures

Why are you making this erroneous name change? Will you please address the comments which already existed on Talk:Bureau international des poids et mesures before your move, and the ones I have added now? Gene Nygaard 03:32, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Erroneous is debatable. In any case, the article (and others of its ilk) has now been moved to conform to the Wikipedia style guide, on the assumption that the English name of the Bureau does have legal existence (a fact that has not been established yet as I write this).

Urhixidur 14:30, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Geosynchronous orbits and "moving gravity"

The sentence referring to "moving gravity" was added by User:hackwrench over a month ago, as part of a burst of similarly questionable edits. I've tracked down most of the ones that weren't already reverted, and restored the paragraph you commented out to something closer to its original form (brief description of how to calculate geosynchronous orbit radius). --Christopher Thomas 07:47, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

On second thought, I'm just deleting the paragraph and adding details of the derivation to the appropriate section in geostationary orbit. It seems out of place in geosynchronous orbit. --Christopher Thomas 07:54, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

815 Coppelia

An A for effort, but an F for fact-checking. Do not insert diacritics in minor planet names unless you can document them. The official, sometimes accented, names can be found on the IPA and Schmadel web pages, whereas the MPC uses the ASCII transcriptions. There are a few discrepancies between these first two sources, which I intend to document on some talk page shortly. Urhixidur 01:53, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

My mistake, I forgot I was fixing the name of the asteroid instead of the name of the ballet, else I would've checked. Thanks for catching it though! -- Rmrfstar 02:22, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites

Fine - I had not spotted that note in the next column. I moved the Sun up because I thought the order of "discovering" them in prehistory would be something like Earth (standing on it), Sun (much the brightest thing in the sky during the day), Moon (much the brightest thing at night), and then the other planets. But no matter: I'll leave it as it is. -- ALoan (Talk) 14:54, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And the amended note makes your reasoning much clearer. Thanks. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:13, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Not Robert, but Sherburne Wesley

Thanks for making the correction to the Robert Burnham disambiguation page. I had originally picked up the erroneous information from the Herbig-Haro object article. I've now made the correction there also. I had an uneasy feeling about it at the time and meant to research it further, but it fell between the cracks. --DannyZ 01:22, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Category:Earth-crosser asteroids

Rather than putting Category:Apollo asteroids beside Category:Earth-crosser asteroids under the common Category:Near-Earth asteroids, since the Apollo asteroid article states they are Earth-crossers, wouldn't it be easier to just recategorise Category:Apollo asteroids under Category:Earth-crosser asteroids? It would avoid having to recat a bunch of asteroid articles... — Urhixidur 23:50, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)

I'm sure you're correct, and I wouldn't have an issue with that. But really you should probably discuss this with the person who created the category. I was just responding to an underpopulated category tag. Thanks. :) — RJH 16:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Since you had started doing the recat, I thought you were the decider. Sorry! Urhixidur 22:10, 2005 Jun 25 (UTC)

Billions

This discussion should probably go on the PlayStation 3 talk page, but I'll post this much here. I do indeed realize that the term "billion" is ambiguous for non-English speakers, but I must point out that is indeed English Wikipedia, and in every English-speaking country I'm aware of, the term "billion" refers to the SI 10^9. -- uberpenguin 18:09, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I quote (emphasis mine):

« in Britain, until the latter part of the 20th century, it was almost exclusively used to mean one million million (1,000,000,000,000), with one thousand million sometimes described as a "milliard", the definition adopted by most other European languages. However, the "American English" version has since been adopted for all published writing, and the word "milliard" is obsolete in English [...]

Nevertheless, [...] a significant proportion of international readers will interpret "billion" as 10¹², even if they are young enough to have been taught otherwise at school. For this reason, defining the word may be advisable when writing for the general public. However, all major British publications and broadcasters, including the BBC, which long used "thousand million" to avoid ambiguity, now use "billion" to mean thousand million. »

My point was that, even within the confines of English, usage of billion should be avoided because it may be misconstrued by a large fraction of non-American English speakers. My original question remains: How do you suggest any chance of misinterpretation be removed from the article? Maybe the billion article and the Wikipedia:Manual of Style be changed so 10E9 is the default meaning...

Urhixidur 18:20, 2005 July 12 (UTC)

Revert of Interwiki on category:Moons

Please don't revert my change, I can send you the graph of the interwiki.py if you want to. But this link is causing the most problems. Category:Moon is linking to the same french Catégory:lune, which is wrong Londenp 21:05, 18 July 2005 (UTC) (sysop of dutch WP)

Now you are doing the same revert on french. I am working one hour on it, to solve this problems and you make my work undone within munites, could you please correct your same revert on FR as well. If you insist on changing it back, then I will back off, but it is not right. The french have divided the moons and lack a category of the earth moon. The cause all the problems, also because on more than one WP two categories were linking to this one categery on fr. I can not win from a sysop, so if you insist, then please solve the problems. Kind regards Londenp 21:13, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't get it. What is the problem you're facing? The english-french category mapping is indeed Moons-Lune, as you can see by comparing the super- and sub-categories:

English - - - Français

Solar system - - - Système solaire

Asteroid satellites - - - Satellite d'astéroïde

Jupiter's moons - - - Lune de Jupiter

Mars' moons - - - Lune de Mars

Neptune's moons - - - Lune de Neptune

Pluto's moons - - -

Saturn's moons - - - Lune de Saturne

Uranus' moons - - - Lune d'Uranus

Aside from the missing Pluto's moons category on the FR side, the only other difference is that EN has a Moon category, whereas FR does not.

Urhixidur 21:19, 2005 July 18 (UTC)

Exactly at the end you see the root of the problem. So all the other wikipedias have two categories but are using fr:lune for both, for instance en:moon and en:moons. this causes the problems with all interwikis. Everytime a bot is doing interwiki, this causes false links. One solution would be to link instead of the earth-moon the category of moons to fr:Catégorie:lune, the other one is to start a (earth)-moon category on fr:. So if you don't like my solution of linking earth-moon to lune then it should change to linking all moons to lune and loose the links to earth-moon Londenp 21:26, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I could send you the interwiki-graph please reply then to londenp at wikipedia point be

I knew this would cause problems one day. I've gone and created « Catégorie:Lune de la Terre ». This makes the category trees unambiguous. Hopefully this fixes the bot problem.

Urhixidur 21:36, 2005 July 18 (UTC)

Thanks, indeed this will solve the problem, but that now all the links are wrong on the wikipedia's. Well that is life. I wanted to solve this problem, now it seems to be solved, but not concluded. I will be working on it again. Kind regards Londenp 21:45, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

C'est tout fait, merci :-) Londenp 21:52, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

ZH I could not fix. How does one edit those, I have no idea.

Urhixidur 21:53, 2005 July 18 (UTC)

same way as normal, you just hope the buttons are on the same position (which they are). My interwikibot didn't return any warning. Good night Londenp 22:24, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Glad you fixed "apsis" back Pdn 00:42, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

force formula to full size

I noticed in an article that you had "forced it to full size" and that you also have an entry on your user page telling how to do it. However, to me they look exactly the same size. Why is that?

Also, I think you made some changes for °C and °F - using a single character instead of two. But on my screen the results are in very different fonts. The °F is a bold sans serif, the °C is a thin serif font. Also, how do you get those into the article - if I copy them to a text editor, they get destroyed. Bubba73 22:00, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

First question: This is probably your user setting for formulae. If you go to your Preferences, under Math, you probably have "Always render PNG" set. I use "HTML if very simple or else PNG", which is why simple formulae are rendered differently (too small).

Second question: Again a user setting. It depends on which fonts you have installed for Unicode support. Your browser will use its default font to render text, until it hits a character absent from the font, at which point it will look through its other fonts (i.e. the other installed system fonts) to find one that has the character. I recommend setting your browser directly to the fully Unicode-enabled fonts (e.g. Arial Unicode MS for Sans Serif) so no jarring aspect change occurs. This is one of those compromise situations; the Unicode characters for the Celsius and Fahrenheit degree are preferrable in those situations where a line break is inserted by the browser between the number and symbol. IE (not sure about Netscape) will break after the "°" but before the "C" or "F" when a non-breaking space lies between the number and the "°". This makes sense when breaking latitude/longitude strings, but not temperatures.

It is odd you seem to get two different aspects for the two degrees; normally they'd be found in the same font —I find it weird you should have a font with just one character and not the other. As for copying to a text editor, WordPad preserves Unicode, Notepad is iffier. Notepad and WordPad have a global font setting in their menus, which should again ideally be set to some Unicode font. To set Notepad's, just open it, set the font, and close Notepad. The setting will be preserved. Not so with Wordpad. The latter can probably be set through some registry trick; I'll look into it later.

Tools exist that allow you to pinpoint available fonts based on a character range. X-Fonter is one, I think.

Urhixidur 13:14, 2005 July 27 (UTC)

The HTML way of inputting the degree characters is explained in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers).

Urhixidur 13:15, 2005 July 27 (UTC)

I origianlly had formulas set to "HTML if simple", but that would do what it implies - some equations would be in HTML and others not, which I didn't like, so I changed it to "always PNG". Bubba73 15:10, July 27, 2005 (UTC)

Unicode subscript numbers in asteroid designations

I understand that they make the title more properly formatted, but they really aren't useful. They are way too small to be readable (I must change the text size to huge to see them properly, and I have good eyesight). Also, not everyone have proper Unicode support so they see only boxes -- rather counter-productive. So let's stick to subscripts and use the "wrong" style in article titles.--Jyril 14:53, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

Alas, I do think you're right. The best we can do at this point is probably just making sure the subscripted entries exist as redirects to the non-subscripted article. The article should, in order for future Google searches to find them, include one mention of the subscripted form.

Urhixidur 14:56, 2005 July 30 (UTC)

Your planet size comparison pic in Commons

I noticed your planet size comparison image has been uploaded to the Commons. Just a little FYI. --The Merciful 10:25, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Cool.

Urhixidur 14:16, 2005 July 31 (UTC)

Template:Minplan

I'd considered making a linkless version, but I figured that typing something like {{minplan|(15760) 1992 QB|1|nolink}} would be longer and more complicated than (15760) 1992 QB₁. The template's real advantage is ditching the double-writing of the name in a piped link, once with a subscript and once without. -The Tom 00:31, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I broke down and added a Template:Minplan2 that generates just the  partr, like so: {{minplan2|(15760) 1992 QB|1}} = (15760) 1992 QB₁. So what if it's actually two characters longer?  :-)

Urhixidur 19:06, 2005 August 1 (UTC)

The Minplan and Minplan2 templates are no longer, replaced by Template:mpl and Template:mp, respectively. Note that the latter is now actually four characters shorter than writing it out! Yea! Rejoice!

Urhixidur 16:49, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

(15874) 1996 TL66

Your recent edit of the above article uses the wrong definitoon of degree when it should have used degree (angle). Ian Cairns 00:21, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

The degree article moved after the template's creation. I'll go correct it right away.

Urhixidur 00:26, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

Actually, the template is blameless; it's my helper software that was written before the degree article moved.

Urhixidur 00:30, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

Just to point out that I've now had to do two exercises recently to correct your articles for this same above point. I'm tempted to let these articles be in future. Ian Cairns 23:03, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Gadzooks, I had forgotten about this! Okay, AstOrb Browser is now up to version 1.31, and the degree link is fixed henceforth and forevermore...

Urhixidur 01:00, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

(3149) Okudzhava

Hello Urhixidur, I replied on my talk page (by mistake :) and this is a re-post. Thanks in advance for your help with proper referencing. - Introvert ^talk 01:03, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

The name's origin may be "confirmed" in your mind, but do you have a reference to supply? An Internet URL is ideal, but even a book reference would do. Otherwise the asterisk mark will go back in (at the Meanings of asteroid names (3001-3500) page). Urhixidur 00:27, 2005 August 22 (UTC)

The reference I used is the IPA(I took it from the Meanings of asteroid names main page).

This IPA's list indeed has Okudzhava for #3149.

Okudzhava is Bulat Okudzhava (there is no other one!); the biography for Bulat Okudzhava] published on the MP site has it that an asteroid was named after him in 1988. The MP site seems rather trustworthy to me: it is The Official site for the writers of Moscow and Moscow region Russian: "Официальный сайт писателей Москвы и Московской области".

Will those references do it or they aren't substantial enough? Where should I have cited those reference? (I looked on the discussion page, didn't seem like the right place.) Thanks - Introvert ^talk 00:59, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

The mp.urbannet.ru ref is good enough, considering your research. I'll put it in. Thanks for explaining. As to the how, the idea is to replace the asterisk in the Meanings of asteroid names entry with a reference, in this case:

| [[3149 Okudzhava]] || 1981 SH || [[Bulat Okudzhava]], Russian (of [[Georgia (country)|Georgian]] descent) poet and songwriter [http://mp.urbannet.ru/TVOR-P/o/okudzava/okudz-tv.htm †]

Urhixidur 21:56, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Isis and Set

Could you substantiate the claim, made in the Isis article, that Set was "gay"? The context supplied also seems to indicate bisexual would be a more appropriate description, but that's straying from the topic somewhat. I am familiar with Ancient Egyptian mentions of masturbation, but homosexuality is rather a low-profile topic.

What would be most useful is a reference to the papyrus or other ancient author reporting the Nephthys/Set/Isis/Anubis tale.

Urhixidur 14:33, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

• He was originally god of the desert, thus infertile, leading to "oh, he must be gay then"
• He had a male lover/boyfriend/partner/fuck-buddy (a Libyan god called Ash, who was god of Oases)
• His favourite food was lettuce. This might be a bit obscure so I'll explain:
  • Egyptian lettuce is very tall and thin (like the shaft of a penis)
  • Egyptian lettuce is very firm (like an erection)
  • Lettuce emits a creamy/milk-like substance when rubbed (c.f. masturbation)
  • I.e. saying lettuce is his favourite food is a euphemism for saying he likes swallowing cock.
• He topped Horus (Interfemoral intercourse) (in the battles between Horus and Set)
• The Oxyrhynchus fish is a symbol of Set, due to its unusual snout resembling that of the strange Set-animal. The Oxyrhynchus fish (representing Set) swallowed one of the 13 body parts of Osiris when Osiris was dismembered by Set. The part it swallowed was the penis.
• Although he was married to Nepthys, he had no children
• He was so uninterested in having sex with Nepthys, even when disguised as the beautiful Isis, she had an affair, resulting in the birth of Anubis

Homosexuality was a non-issue in ancient Egypt - Set being gay meant nothing significant, simply an extrapolation of his being god of desert, and thus infertile. --RayGun 11:07, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

All of the above is inconclusive, being mere speculation. It would be more accurate to describe Set as bisexual, since Isis tricked him into attempting to rape her (to discredit him during his lawsuit against Horus —this seems to contradict the bit about his disinterest in Nephthys). She also served him salad that had been spiked with Horus' sperm —and got him pregnant in this way. Like you say, sexual orientation was essentially a non-issue in Ancient Egypt. Still, before stating that Set was homosexual, you need stronger evidence than the above. For example, the oxyrhynchus swallowing Osiris' organ is more likely a metaphor/symbol for robbing Osiris of his generative power; what's important is what Osiris lost, not the particular method used.

Urhixidur 15:13, 2005 August 22 (UTC)

Saddle point

I am not a math person. Is a horse saddle a math function like the monkey saddle (versus an additional link to a piece of horse tack)? PerlKnitter 11:54, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Horse saddles and monkey saddles are generic types of saddle points, not specific functions/surfaces. I think the monkey saddle article is too specific in its formula; replacing the 3 by any other constant should give surfaces with the same properties. I'll have to look more closely into that. To see an article which uses the two terms consistently and in contrast with each other, consult: http://nature.berkeley.edu/~goster/oster/cubic.pdf

Urhixidur 12:15, 2005 September 9 (UTC)

Ouch! Proteins AND Math. :-) Ok, thanks, I get the general idea.

PerlKnitter 17:32, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Mean surface temperature of asteroid

Hi! I'm an user of italian Wikipedia (first, sorry for my english :D). I'm looking for the formula of mean surface temperature of asteroid. I suppose the color index B-V is correlated (it's true for a star), but i'm not sure. Can you help me, please? Thanks!!! --Dread83 10:57, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

My French user page already has a discussion of this. The formula is:

$T=\left({\frac {(1-A)L_{0}}{\epsilon \sigma 16\pi a^{2}}}\right)^{1/4}\,\!$

Where $A\,\!$ is the asteroid albedo, $a\,\!$ its semi-major axis, $L_{0}\,\!$ is the solar luminosity (3.827E26 W), $\sigma \,\!$ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.67040238774897E-08 W/m²K⁴), and $\epsilon \,\!$ is the asteroid's infra-red emissivity. The standard value of 0.9 is used. Applying this to the Sun (albedo 0, emissivity 1, radius 696 Mm) gives the expected surface temperature of 5770 K.

Urhixidur 21:49, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Orbits of Phobos and Deimos animation

Hi. I am the author of the "bloody" animation in question. I didn't realise it was standard practice to show orbits from the North Pole of the object they are orbiting. I can reverse the animation if you think it is a major issue. --JiFish(Talk/Contrib) 22:11, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

I hope you weren't offended by my use of "bloody" —I just felt like grumbling a bit. Trust me, I'm harmless.  :-) Yes, if you could please switch the orbit directions, I think it would help most readers, as it is indeed standard practice to show planets and the like from the "top", i.e. from over the north pole (Venus and Uranus are a different matter, of course). Are you sure you got the periods right? They seem to be in the wrong ratio, unless I'm mistaken. Also, could you also animate the rotation of Mars (e.g. by adding a prime meridian line, say), so we can see how Phobos overtakes it but Deimos doesn't? Thanks in advance.

Urhixidur 14:02, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

To be quite honest, I was a little offended. But I got over it. :)

Unfortunately, I'm not an astronomer, not even an amateur astronomer, just a guy that thinks space is cool. So I am afraid I don't know what you mean by "the periods". The animation was captured from within a solar system simulator software, so I assumed it to be correct. If it turns out to be wrong, I shall have to contact the authors of the software.

I can produce a reversed version of the animation but I am afraid I won't have time to add a prime meridian line, since this will require me to recreate the animation from scratch. --JiFish(Talk/Contrib) 18:34, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

The periods are timed right: Phobos completes just slightly less than four orbits in the time it takes Deimos to do one (the ratio is 3.96). My impression was mistaken. Anyway, if you could reverse the animation, I believe numerous people would appreciate it.

You're right: space is cool!

Urhixidur 18:45, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

All done. Thanks for your time. If it get some spare time I'll attempt a new one that shows the rotation of Mars too. Also, I'd quite like to get rid of the background stars. --JiFish(Talk/Contrib) 19:08, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Great Eastern Salvage

Thanks for buffing up the SS Great Eastern article. :)

I'm a little torn about the inclusion of the Great Eastern Salvage link though. While it includes information on Great Eastern artifacts, it is a site that purchases those items. --Syrthiss 14:45, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, at least it isn't trying to sell you any...  :-)

Urhixidur 16:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Heheheh. ok. --Syrthiss 16:38, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

2003 UB313: Yes it is POV

It gained a minor planet nomenclature because it is the "procedure" (not an astronomical fact, as you said very incorrectly), but that doesn't mean it is a minor planet to have a template of that. No one officially said it is a minor planet. It is being discussed if it is a planet or a minor planet, it is not a minor planet because it was discovered to be a minor planet, that is very...So I disagree with the revert, but I'll not start a revert war because of that. -Pedro 02:40, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

We're voting on the title of the article Provisional designation of asteroids

.. at Talk:Provisional designation of asteroids#Approval. Given that you've edited that article, you may wish to make your voice heard. Thanks! -- hike395 02:09, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

User Categorisation

You were listed on the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Quebec page as living in or being associated with Quebec. As part of the Wikipedia:User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Quebec for instructions.--Rmky87 02:52, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Vienna State Flag

hello Urhixidur, I see that you once uploaded the Austrian State Flag. I am desperately searching the state flag of Vienna (red-white flag with the coat of arms in the middle) but I cannot find it anywhere on Wikipedia? Do you think you could me out somehow? I really appreciate it, thank you. Gryffindor 20:52, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Excessive bolding

Please don't make every line on a disambiguation page bold. This makes the page look more cluttered, especially if some of the bold items are blue links and others below them are black text. It also goes against the recommendation in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages).

Also, don't make the first words of paragraphs bold, when they are not the lead sentence of the article (example: Odbert Island). This is sometimes done for alternate names of the article's subject, but is only confusing and distracting from the subject if it's done for sub-topics. Longer sections should have headings, but when they're just short paragraphs it's obvious what their subject is without the extra visual emphasis. It's also not recommended in Wikipedia:Guide to layout#Introductory material.

If a word has to be emphasized, using italics is preferable. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-1 03:25 Z

In the case of Odbert Island (and others like it), Haunn Bluff and Swan Point were bolded because their articles are redirects to Odbert Island. The text is thus the concatenation of what would otherwise be three too-small pages. The use of italics makes more sense for the proper names of ships and for foreign language quotes. Maybe we could use small caps instead?

I'll try to go back to my changes and line them up with the MoS.

Urhixidur 13:14, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay, sorry for making assumptions. I didn't realize that article encompassed several headwords.

Italics are used for emphasis, foreign languages, ships, titles of major works like books, and probably other stuff. Usually it doesn't get confusing.

Small caps would be great, but technically they may be a little problematic. There's no standard wikitext way of creating them, and they may not look that great in every single font. They could look clunky if we only started using them in a few articles.

On the other hand, they may be just the thing for secondary headwords, like in Odbert Island. It may be worth bringing up at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). It would also be nice if abbreviations like WWII and KGB would appear in small caps. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-1 15:52 Z

Section headings are a good idea. As for small caps (not the same as "small font"), you may wish to look into the {{bsm}} and {{esm}} templates (e.g. small caps).

Urhixidur 16:02, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Asteroid bot

I read your contributions about asteroids. I've requested an asteroid bot to maintain the lists of asteroids and create new articles for asteroids. I took days to collected data from different sources about asteroids and it looks much more complex than my thought before, do you have any suggestions? - Yaohua2000 03:53, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I've already laid down some guidelines for filling out the Template:Minor_Planet in the PDF accompanying my AstOrb Browser application (it is due for an update soon, as the astorb.dat format is changing to accommodate the "100k" bug; I'll also imbed use of the Template:mpl in the browser's output). I'll repeat the salient points here:

• The discoverer and discovery date can be extracted from the List of asteroids if already in there, or from the MPC Discovery Circumstances page: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/NumberedMPs.html (note that some errors lie in there, and that some observatories, such as Klet, provide more complete lists now and then)
• Alternate designations come from the MPC search form: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPDes.html
• Albedos and rotations can come from a variety of sources

Additionally:

• The Talk:Meanings of asteroid names discussion stores the evanescent http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/ECS/NewCitations.txt page, an essential reference. I've put that page on watch, but the watch services can drop the page if goes missing for a period of time, which does happen.
• Diacritics can be extracted from the Schmadel pages (currently missing) and the Russian IPA pages. I use a Microsoft Word macro to fetch and extract those automatically. I then compare with the previous edition of diacritics.txt. I maintain in parallel the fr:Discuter:Désignation_des_astéroïdes#Francisation page.
• AstOrb.dat updates I scan for new namings using a special purpose Java applet which prints out a "change log". When an asteroid gets named, we must update the List of asteroids and add an entry in Meanings of asteroid names; wiki should also, ideally, be searched for occurrences of the old designation (What links here is a good method; it even works with pages that don't exist yet, eh, eh).

Hopefully this answers your questions. Anything else I can do to help?

Urhixidur 16:30, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Neptune Trojans

Hi Urhixidur, I saw you added some new Trojan asteroids. I'd like to know where did you get the information that they're actually Trojan asteroids? MPC list [7] has only the two previously known Neptune Trojans. These new objects may orbit at the same distance as Neptune, even share the orbit, but that doesn't necessarily make them Trojans (for example, 2002 AA29). Only asteroids that are located in the Lagrangian points L₄ or L₅ are Trojan asteroids.--Jyril 18:59, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Here are the relevant bits from MPML Digest 1936:

Message: 2

Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:36:50 -0000

From: "andrew_j_walker" <ajw01@uow.edu.au>

Subject: Likely new Neptune Trojan?

Congrats to Trujillo and Sheppard for discovering 2005 TN53 which is likely to be the 3rd known Neptune Trojan. The MPEC at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K05/K05U92.html gives an arc of just over 18 days. I used these elements in NEAPLOT to integrate it over 50k years with a 2 year step, and the motion was consistent with a trojan, but of course it needs a second opposition to check this.

Message: 3

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:58:06 -0800

From: Alan W Harris <awharris@spacescience.org>

Subject: Re: Likely new Neptune Trojan?

At 06:55 PM 10/29/2005, MPEC mailing list wrote:

>M.P.E.C. 2005-U92 Issued 2005 Oct. 30, 02:42 UT

>.................................

> The assumed perihelic 1:1 Neptune-resonance orbit keeps the object more

>than 15 AU from Neptune over a 14 000-year period.

>

>Brian G. Marsden (C) Copyright 2005 MPC M.P.E.C.

>2005-U92

Well, yes. You constrain the solution to a resonant orbit and voila, when you integrate it, it resonates!

Message: 4

Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 01:51:53 -0000

From: "andrew_j_walker" <ajw01@uow.edu.au>

Subject: Re: Likely new Neptune Trojan?

I'm missing something here. When the MPC calculates the orbit, are you saying they would have chosen this orbit out of the many possible orbits specifically because it resonates? Or do they calculate the best fitting orbit, integrate it, and then state that it resonates? I assumed the second, in which case integrating for longer is interesting, as some objects appear to be stable in the short term but don't when looked at over a longer interval. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the line starting with "The assumed perihelic...", what exactly is being assumed??

PS As I compose this, http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K05/K05U97.html has been posted with two more of these objects! Is someone listening :-)

Message: 5

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 19:28:01 -0700 (MST)

From: Brian Skiff <brian.skiff@lowell.edu>

Subject: Re: Likely new Neptune Trojan?

Do note two more Trujillo-Sheppard Neptune trojans on a successive MPEC:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K05/K05U97.html

Since these things are observable at present, folks who can get to mag 23 might try extending the arcs.

Message: 7

Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 01:25:54 -1000 (HST)

From: Dave Tholen <tholen@IFA.Hawaii.Edu>

Subject: Re: Likely new Neptune Trojan?

It is being assumed that the object is at perihelion. Note the value of the mean anomaly. Very close to zero (360).

However, it is very premature to assume that the published orbit is the correct one. The following a-e-i triples also satisfy the available observations.

(follows a very long series of a-e-i solutions)

I've edited the Neptune article to reflect the uncertainty. Urhixidur 19:13, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)

You might want to check this guideline out before making anymore style changes or reording of disambiguation pages. It talks about bolding and piping of links, non-disambiguation links and the ordering of entries. Josh Parris # 04:52, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Beside the dubious "most frequent first" guideline (which is typically undecidable), I think I've been following very closely the rules about bolding and piping (and cutting down some of the non-disambig links), so what precisely prompted this bit of talk?

Urhixidur 05:06, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

No, you've got it in one, it's the "most frequent first" guideline. However, I can decide that, because I disambiguate GM regularly. General Motors is the most common GM, followed by Genetically Modified. But I'd suggest that sorting things alphabetically is just as meaningless as an unsorted list. Josh Parris # 07:46, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem with "most frequent first" is that it depends heavily on context. A computer person won't have the same "most frequent" (i.e, "familiar") initialisms as, say, a military person. The "public at large" is also a poorly-defined beast. I'm sure some initialisms carry different "most frequent" meanings in the southern U.S. than in Canada, Australia, or the U.K., for example. And Google counts are useless in this regard.

This point aside, a sorted list has a distinct advantage over a pêle-mêle one : if you know what you're looking for, you can find it much faster than if you have to scan the list sequentially. Granted, if you're on a disambiguation page you're probably not always completely sure what you're looking for...

Urhixidur 20:05, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

AM

Your input would be useful at Talk:AM where the wikilinks and other non-MoS:DP content is being added back by User:Tobias Conradi. Thanks/wangi 18:02, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Comet template

I'm looking for feedback on my {{Comet}} proposal. If you have time can you give it a "look over"? Thanks! Awolf002 20:30, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

It's a start. Note how much space has to be devoted to "Alternate designations". For the historical comets, the orbit computer is sometimes more important than the discoverer (quite a few comets bear the names of the computers, not the discoverers). A parameter for the computer would therefore be nice, or we could broaden the "discoverer" label to "Discoverer and/or Computer". Other potential parameters should be imported from the Minor Planet template:

• Longitude of the ascending node (Ω)
• Argument of perihelion (ω)
• Mean anomaly (M) [at epoch, of course]
• Perihelion orbital speed
• Dimensions
• Mass
• Density
• Surface gravity
• Escape velocity
• Rotation period
• Absolute magnitude
• Albedo

Urhixidur 22:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

asteroid physical characteristics

Hi Urhixidur, I've just created a page with the cumbersome title Standard asteroid physical characteristics linked to from Template:Minor Planet, which tries to be a reference explaining where physical data comes from for run-of-the-mill generic asteroids. This issue has been bugging me for ages. I've put up what I have been able to surmise, but I'm hoping to bait those (like You) who have been active among the asteroids, and probably know more about this. Deuar 21:13, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your input on this! And for fixing all those silly grammatical errors of mine. Hah - and I'm supposed to be the english native speaker... Deuar 13:15, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Amazing Thanks

Well thank you for that little template gift. The amazing part is how you ever found my tiny asteroid on which to land, please. --hydnjo talk 23:06, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

For the lurkers, he's talking about Template:e, which I mentioned on User:Hydnjo/sb#Wiki_markup. I reached that page because of Image:PopulationBreakdownMBTI.jpg, which I was hunting down the references of before making sure it was used properly (that explains how I found the landing pad).  :-)

Now, there is 2521 Heidi and a whole bunch of asteroids with "Joe" as part of their name (seven, not counting those which obviously refer to "Joel" or variations thereof). Maybe 10515 Old Joe is yours too?

Urhixidur 14:52, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, now I understand your preference for edit slot 501. Heidi was delighted to learn that she shares her namesake (Heidi) with an asteroid, and I imagine Old Joe (the clock tower) and I may have a few things in common. The only one I was familiar with before now was 2177 Oliver, a fine scientist with whom I enjoyed many conversations. We have of course memorialized all of this. Thank you, --hydnjo talk 19:27, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Now that 10515 Old Joe has a proper blue link methinks I should go for the 10515^th position on the edit list. ;-) --hydnjo talk 15:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Why did you undo my work?

I corrected a number of mistakes in orbital elements. (Deuer thanked me for it.) You changed the epoch...and made mistakes. Such as not changing the mean anamoly, even in the case of Flora, where it changed 4.2 degrees over those 14 days.

The orbital elements come directly from astorb.dat, and should therefore contain no errors. I was worried because some of the orbital speed recalculations implied (in the change explanation) that a circular approximation had been used instead of the desirable elliptical calculation. Whether the epoch is closer to now or a few days further in the past shouldn't matter much; there is no way we could keep the hundreds of asteroid articles synchronised epoch-wise. Not sure about the "mistake" in 8 Flora. I'll go check.

Urhixidur 15:39, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Yikes! There is apparently a bug in AstOrb Browser 1.4 (probably induced by the astorb.dat format change) which caused it to read the epoch incorrectly. The "12 nov" epochs are actually 26 nov! Thanks for catching that!

Urhixidur 15:47, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

You're welcome. About the speeds. Those have been caclulcated by the posters, using the elements. To check, I calculated the speeds assuming e=0, and lots of times it matched the speed in the article. In those cases I redid it using an elliptical calculation. Actually, I discovered mistake in the equation I put in my spreadsheet...a wrong parentheses in one of the minor terms. I might need to make tiny corrections :(

As for the mean anamoly complaint. The MA tells us how far the asteroid would have advanced since the time of perihelion, if it had a circular orbit. So it keeps changing, regularly. By about a quarter of a degree a day, in many cases. Since it changes more than the other elements with time, it was easy to find the date problem. I compared it with JPL.

Anyway, I'm glad we cleared this up.

AstOrb Browser computes the average speed using the true ellipse circumference (Ramanujan's formula, anyway), but it is true this usually makes little difference...

Urhixidur 02:49, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

AstOrb Browser 1.4.1 is now available and fixes the epoch day bug.

Urhixidur 03:37, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

First, I want to say I'm very impressed by all the good work you put into Wikipedia. I'm not questioning the accuracy of any source here. But many, at least, of the speed entries have been calculated manually, and not everyone knows that eccentricity makes a difference. The difference between the circular and elliptic answers is not usually large, but it is noticable and can be checked with certainty.

I was wondering, is the use of AstOrb or a similar program something that has always been around in Wikipedia? And again, I salute you for your work.

AstOrb Browser came about at the very beginning of Wikipedia's "asteroid era", when the Template:Minor Planet took form. It became obvious back then that a lot of entries in the table were computed and that automation was therefore a good idea. You can spot the manual entries fairly easily: they usually lack some of the computed fields, such as gravity and escape velocity. And of course there are still plenty of asteroid stub articles with old "asteroid boxes".

Urhixidur 20:33, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

You did very nice on those asteroid lists I created.

Thanks. And what if change "Provisional Designation" to "Provisional designation"? — Yaohua2000 21:56, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I needed only change Template:List of asteroids/header1. Done.

Urhixidur 03:15, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Clustered orbital poles

Hi Urhixidur,

You posted a graphic [Image:Poles.png] in the Jupiter article that says only that "Jupiter is so massive it clusters the orbital poles of the other planets around its own." Could you elaborate? What would the mechanism be? If tidal effects, how would that work? You could probably profitably dedicate a paragraph to this topic. Without some explanation, it's just a tease.

Also, I started to try to answer the old question on why Jupiter rotates faster than the other planets (and the Sun), until I realized I didn't have the foggiest idea what I was talking about. You had a sort of non-answer there, but I wonder if you might know more than you're letting on :)

kwami 08:47, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Mutual gravitational perturbations between the planets would tend to bring them all close to a common plane. The ecliptic is just Earth's orbital plane, a convenient observational reference for us Earth-bound carbon units, but the solar system's true plane of reference would be the average plane of the original proto-planetary nebula. Naturally, Jupiter would be expected to lie close to that average. By the same token, we would expect that plane to be close to the Sun's equatorial plane. The actual angles bear this out fairly well.

As for Jupiter's rotation, any object is going to gather more and more angular momentum as it accumulates matter from its surroundings. Since Jupiter is the most massive, it is also the one with the most rotational momentum. This isn't a hard and fast rule, since planets shed excess angular momentum by begetting retinues of satellites; Jupiter's set is particularly massive, which is probably why Saturn is such a close competitor on the angular momentum scale.

Urhixidur 13:05, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Image:Bolivia civil flag large.png has been listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded, Image:Bolivia civil flag large.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

--Sherool (talk) 15:55, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Image:Costa rica civil ensign large.png has been listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded, Image:Costa rica civil ensign large.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

--Sherool (talk) 00:32, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Astronomy heads-up

Hi - I edited astronomy last night to remove some excess astrology stuff, including the listing of astrology as a field of study under astronomy. My changes were quickly reverted by a self proclaimed judicial astrologer. As you have argued for rationality in the astronomy article before, I thought you would find it interesting - and help may be needed :-) Thanks Vsmith 14:56, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I would have caught that eventually through my watch list, but no matter. The article seems to be in decent enough shape as I write this. Thanks for the heads-up.

Urhixidur 04:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)