User talk:Dicklyon

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Sunset at Huntington Beach.jpg Dick is taking a short wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia eventually. I'm running on low for a while, and should just leave it alone until I finish my book, but I backslide.

Please add new talk topics at the bottom of the page, and sign with ~~~~

Barnstar.png The Original Barnstar
I'm not sure why you haven't picked up a bevy of these already, but thanks for all your effort, particularly in tracking down good sources with diagrams, etc., on the photography- and color-related articles (not to mention fighting vandalism). Those areas of Wikipedia are much richer for your work. Cheers! —jacobolus (t) 02:05, 27 February 2008 (UTC)


Barnstar-camera.png The Photographer's Barnstar
To Dicklyon on the occasion of your photograph of Ivan Sutherland and his birthday! What a great gift. -User:SusanLesch 04:40, 23 May 2008 (UTC)


Allaroundamazingbarnstar.png All Around Amazing Barnstar
For your hard work in improving and watching over the Ohm's law article SpinningSpark 00:59, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


Original Barnstar.png The Original Barnstar
For your improvements to the Centrifugal force articles. Your common sense approach of creating a summary-style article at the simplified title, explaining the broad concepts in a way that is accessible to the general reader and linking to the disambiguated articles, has provided Wikipedia's readership with a desperately needed place to explain in simple terms the basic concepts involved in understanding these related phenomena. Wilhelm_meis (talk) 14:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


Surreal Barnstar.png The Surreal Barnstar
For your comment here which at once admits your own errors with humility yet focusses our attention upon the real villain Egg Centric (talk) 17:09, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Mauve...

Hi Dick,

re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauve

What's wrong with my comment?

Cheers, Duncan. DuncanMcC (talk) 13:23, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

You mean this diff? It's not WP:Verifiable; not supported by a WP:Reliable source. And essentially indistinguishable from vandalism. Dicklyon (talk) 16:12, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Dick

[edit] Crederity

Could you point out the places which does not support the notability criteria in WP:ORG. I have removed primary sources and have cited independent secondary sources for the article. Haribhagirath (talk) 10:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

All the parts I looked at don't. This is an odd turnaround request. You have the sources, and the criteria. Tell me what source supports what criterion. The first ref is about VC firms; it is useful to verify your founding date and the fact that you got funded, but doesn't say anything much about the company. The next two are cited to verify that you got funded, and the fourth says you appear in list. The fifth says it started as a startup. So I got tired of looking and asked you to point out if there are sources about the company. Dicklyon (talk) 04:58, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

There are 11 references not just 5. [User:Haribhagirath|Haribhagirath]] (talk) 10:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Right, so I've considerably narrowed down what you have to look through for some evidence of notability. Dicklyon (talk) 05:31, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
By the way, if you sign by four tildes as in ~~~~, you won't get those broken signatures. Dicklyon (talk) 05:32, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Thank you, I am new to wikipedia. Was researching on iconology and the impact of trust seals so came across this firm. I put across references for the sentences and profile mentioned. Do advice me more about notability guidelines Haribhagirath (talk) 05:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Read WP:ORG. Especially WP:ORG#Primary_criteria. Then say what sources have "significant" coverage. Dicklyon (talk) 05:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank You Mr. Lyon. However 6th & 8th references meets the criteria. Haribhagirath (talk) 06:26, 18 February 2011 (UTC) (talk) 05:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I would say that 6 and 8 look trivial based on "quotations from an organization's personnel as story sources." Not much else there, just your guy telling his story. Dicklyon (talk) 06:35, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
8 can be classified under "quotations from an organization's personnel as story sources." But not 6 or 9. Haribhagirath (talk) 06:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)(talk) 06:26, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Mr. Lyon, I did a check on the media exposure of the company during the weekend. And I must agree to your point on the guidelines point of view. Thank you for the information. I would be much grateful if you can provide more insights about research for wikipedia and academic research, Haribhagirath (talk) 07:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)talk) 06:26, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] MHP: Completely agree

Hi, DickLyon. Just wanted to say that I completely agree with your analysis of the MHP situation (excepting of course your interpretation of my own behaviour, but I won't hold that against you). I would like the article to be like Martin Hogbin wants it to be, for the same good reasons. In many discussions with him over the last couple of years he has always struck me as being the most sensible, least dogmatic, and one of the best informed, of all the editors over there. Finding the right synthesis of "creative" (pedagogical) composition with proper adherance to wikipedia policies. A good article on wikipedia need not be boring. I too think that the reason it is more or less frozen in an appalling state is due to the "proprietary" behaviour of one editor, and the dogmatic attitude of another who says that there is one and only one correct way to solve MHP and that that is by using conditional probability. These behaviours have already scared away other well qualified editors from working on the page. I have stuck it out for quite a while (but then I do enjoy a good fight, at least, with words, and I am not scared to be called names in public -- you should see what the Dutch lawyers have written about me in their journals and in the newspapers.

There is so much to be learnt about and from MHP, it is simply amazing. I use it in my own teaching a lot, both to maths students and to lawyers and doctors and journalists; and I've corresponded with many of the authors of the reliable sources on the topic. Richard Gill (talk) 13:47, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think we agree pretty much, though I have runins with Martin sometimes that gives me a somewhat different assessment; it seems to me that he resists compromise too much. As to your own situation, as I said I think that in your position, your help can't really help. You're conflicted out by having an off-wikipedia dog in the fight. Dicklyon (talk) 19:28, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Well, I do try to keep off the main page, but I enjoy talking on the talk pages. My fifty or so edits of the last hundred were largely confined to a one day's drafting sesson on one small paragraph, which was designed to build a bridge between conditional and simple solutions! Most of them were truly "minor edits". As well as adding the necessary references, and correcting some of the older ones. And all of it meticulously researched and with reliable sources behind it. (I do need to learn how to use a sandbox, or at the least, press on the "preview" button more often).
My "own research" is not new research in the sense of new mathematics. And certainly not new research with which I can bolster my CV and publication list. On the contrary, my over-serious colleagues think I'm stupid, wasting time on this, when I could be proving difficult theorems which only half a dozen other experts can understand but which sure do show that I'm a top mathematician.
What I have been doing is that I've been listening to the intuitive and informal arguments of smart laypersons, and recognising in them standard mathematical arguments used by the better (OK - in my opinion, better) mathematicians. Arguments based on symmetry, structure. Ways to solve MHP with full mathematical rigour, but (/and) based on important and simultanteously intuitive ideas (symmetry, Bayes' rule, symmetrization, randomization) rather than on dumb computations or formula manipulations. Then I search for those same ideas in the mathematical literature. And I find them there, of course, since they are the obvious ideas of any good mathematician thinking about MHP! Persi Diaconis, William Bell, Jeff Rosenthal; and a whole heap of mathematical economists and game theorists. The reason the MHP page remains a mess and a battleground is because it has long been frozen in a state in which it promotes a limited and pedantic point of view. So intelligent lay persons come to the page expecting enlightenment and then are told that they are dumb, but that they have to learn formal probability calculus in order to find the right answer!
It doesn't matter to me if my own publications compromise my own position as an active editor of this particular page in the future. The publications are out there, people will read them, or not read them. It's the ideas which are important, not who happens to be the bearer of them at any moment. Richard Gill (talk) 15:21, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Well, good as all that sounds, it doesn't address the problem on the page, which is the polarized set of editors. That's why I gave up on it. It's just not possible to improve the article in the current editing climate. But thanks for trying. Dicklyon (talk) 17:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
The solution would be to temporarily ban the polarizers: the dogmatists, the fundamentalists, the extremists, the specialists, the revolutionaries, and the conservatives ( the reactionaries)) from editing the page. Let the constructive, sensitive, and imaginative-compromise-able get to work together with any new editors who turn up. My proposal would be to temporarily topic-ban *everyone* (including me) except for three: Kmhkmh, Martin Hogbin and Gerhard Valentin. Richard Gill (talk) 15:09, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Good luck with that. There's nobody empowered to make such a decision, and plenty of us who would argue that it's not quite right. Dicklyon (talk) 17:47, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Discrete frequency

I've tried to edit the article into something that is indisputably correct. Please review, and if you find there is no residual dispute, please remove the {{disputed}} tag.  --Lambiam 19:36, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

What a clever solution! Hopefully nobody will be so lame as to object. Done. Dicklyon (talk) 02:26, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] High Five!

Just wanted to give you an internet high five! You seem like a swell guy, and your hearing research is extremely interesting.

Care to give any undeserved advice to an engineering student?

Yes, sign your talk-page posts with four tildes. What else are you into? Email me. Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Logarithmic spiral

Thanks! Melchoir (talk) 09:49, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] RE: RGB color model#See also

Hello. Though it wasn't me who added the RGBY link in the first place I could see why it might be relevant. RBGY is, after all, a very similar concept to RGB, but is not part of the article. The fact that Quattron is the only brand to utilize RGBY at the moment, hence RGBY redirecting to Quattron I guess, is no reason to dismiss the idea. And No; after re-naming the link to remove any reference to RGBY it's not really worth linking to Quattron, per se. (See also: Straw man!)

I'll leave it up to you. You seem to know what's what. :) nagualdesign (talk) 14:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Do you have a source that suggests that RGBY is an any sense a "similar concept" to RGB? From what I've read, it's really more of a marketing gimic, not a conceptual color space. Especially as employed as part of a trichromatic color reproduction system, it's just a hack, not a concept. Dicklyon (talk) 16:34, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
it is well recognized that usual RGB systems cannot reproduce color space as seen by the naked eye;

whether "RGBY" is an improvement is matter of debate —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.189.170.229 (talk) 03:42, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Restoration of unsourced biomedical content at Acupuncture point

Your rationale for this edit was

"this article was dismantled on the basis of WP:MEDRS, which doesn't actually say anything about how to treat alternatives; let's leave it until we decide"

The lead of WP:MEDRS says

"This guideline supports the general sourcing policy at Wikipedia:Verifiability, with specific attention to sources appropriate for the medical and health-related aspects in any type of article, including information about alternative medicine."

Would you consider undoing your edit? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 23:52, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Somehow I missed that when I searched for "alternative"; seems inappropriate anyway. It seems unreasonable to dismantle a sourced article. This guy PPdd or whatever he's called has been on a destructive binge, it seems to me, trying to tear down articles on alternatives to standard medicine, based on what sources are OK per standard medicine. This is not an NPOV way to go, but rather a very anti-alternative POV. I'm not a proponent of any of these alternatives, and have not used them, but I'd like to see articles that explain them. Dicklyon (talk) 02:38, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
It's interesting that the "alternative medicine" bit was inserted without discussion on 4 Dec. 2010, by my old friend User:WhatamIdoing. What's that about? Dicklyon (talk) 02:51, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
PPdd edits per Wikipedia policies and guidelines. I'm asking you to do the same. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:20, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Etiquette violations

All medical claims in any article of any kind must be sourced per MEDRS standards. That is the spirit of MEDRS, so users using Wiki for information do not go away with false medical information. This is even more important than WP:BLP. Claims about beliefs and practices of alt med have lower standards.

You have ignored my repeated efforts to discuss your reverts of my edits, ignored my requests for apologies for attakcing me with false accusations like in the above section and here[1], and you have ignored MEDRS, RS, and WP:BURDEN, and reverted good, good faith, and well explained edits.
You did not even tall me you were attacking me all over like this. Please discuss here[2].
Please read the discussions linked to in the relevant section at Talk:Acupuncture point.
I hope after you read the links I provided at talk in acupuncture point, that you change your "keep" vote to a "redirect", so we can have unanimous consensus. Alternatively, if you can at least cite enough things that should be in acupuncture point, but should not be in acupuncture, then I will change my vote! You should provide these at the AfD discussion. I am much more concerned with reasoned discourse than [[WP:ETIQUETTE|etiquette (which I tend to loundly fart at), so feel free to call me anything you want if it is in the context of a reasoned and responsive discussion. :) PPdd (talk) 04:37, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
So now a dinner break is an etiquette violation? Gee, sorry. I'll look at those links and see what you're going on about. Dicklyon (talk) 04:51, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Please undo your revert for these reasons, I don't want to do it because I will be accused of edit warring

  • (Regarding the MEDICAL findings, one by one, in the article, that I deleted, one by one. None of the following is a secondary source, and the alternative medicine journals are not peer reviewed by scientists or doctors, so are not allowed for medical conclusions.
  • (1) Here is from the header in bold red face of the first 1997 “MEDRS” ref – “This statement is more than five years old and is provided solely for historical purposes. Due to the cumulative nature of medical research, new knowledge has inevitably accumulated in this subject area in the time since the statement was initially prepared. Thus some of the material is likely to be out of date, and at worst SIMPLY WRONG.”
  • (2) Here is the second ref, a PRIMARY source study in an “anyone can publish as long as they pay us” journal that says - “To provide open access, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLoS ONE the publication fee is US$1350.”
  • (3) The third ref is a PRIMARY source study
  • (4) The fourth ref is a PRIMARY source study in an acupuncture journal, peer reviewed by acupuncturists, which picked an authoritative name “Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine”, and has a Wiki article of its own with no RS supporting any of it, so should also be up for AfD.
  • (5) The fifth ref is not about medical claims
  • (6) The sixth source I did not delete.
  • (7) The seventh ref is a PRIMARY source study in this journal – “Journal of traditional Chinese medicine = Chung i tsa chih ying wen pan / sponsored by All-China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine”
  • (8) The eighth ref is a PRIMARY source study –
  • (9) The ninth ref is a PRIMARY source study in this jounral – “Journal of alternative and complementary medicine”
  • (10) The tenth ref is a PRIMARY source study.
  • (11) The eleventh ref is a proposal of a hypothesis
  • (12) The twelfth ref is a PRIMARY source study
  • (13) The thirteent ref is a PRIMARY source study
  • (14) The fourteenth ref is a review in an acupuncture journal, peer reviewed by acupuncturists, which picked an authoritative name “Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine”, and has a Wiki article of its own with no RS supporting any of it, so should also be up for AfD.
  • (15) The fifteenth source is a New Age alt med pop diet book, “The Complete Guide to Sensible Eating”
  • (16) The sixteenth source is an alt med published book, “Acupressure's Potent Points: A Guide to Self-Care for Common Ailments”
  • (17) The seventeenth ref sources content that I did not delete
  • (18) The eighteenth ref is is a dead link
  • (19) The nineteenth ref is a acupuncture website
  • (20) The twentieth ref is in Chinese
  • (21) The twentifirst ref is a book of nomencalature
  • (21) The tweentisecond ref is in Chinese PPdd (talk) 08:56, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Your keep vote

Separate from the above section, I do not understand the basis of your keep vote WP:CONTENTFORK.

[edit] acutalk & entry

Thanks for keeping an eye on it. the few of us who are , pro-acupuncture, are outnumbered and "out experienced" by editors with stated anti-acupuncture pov on the talk page. To my mind this does show in the some wording of the article. The wording is going through changes where more experienced editors are removing pov wording that the regular editors on the page do not find pov, but any help in that direction is welcome. On my part, I encourage your edits or comments on the appropriateness of the talk page. Soll22 (talk) 15:17, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm not pro-acupuncture, but pro-information; I don't want to take on a fight, but I'll see what I can do. Dicklyon (talk) 15:42, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Acupuncture points

Note that in my opinion your revert did not improve the content of the page in several ways:

I realize the page is up for AFD, but my additions would have increased the chance of the page surviving an AFD, not worsened it, in addition to improving the sourcing. That being said, after the AFD has closed, would you be opposed to me undoing your change? I firmly believe my edits improved a fairly terrible page. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 22:09, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I think you should feel free to improve it, but more slowly, not reducing the article to half size quicker than any other editor can react, being very clear about reasons when you remove something, and preferably keeping your edits independently undoable. I haven't had time to really look at them, just object to decimating the article in such a rush. It took 4.5 years to double from 13KB to 26KB; we don't need to take it back to 10KB in one session. Dicklyon (talk) 22:34, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Ugh, re-reading my original post, it came across as far too snippy a reply for your extremely defensible edit. I posted in a hurry and didn't revisit it before saving. I've added the rather inadequate "in my opinion" to the first line and reworded. My apologies for my earlier curtness.
Consider that removing an entire section of unsourced material is one edit though, and there were two large sections that were either completely lacking in sources (and extraordinarily dubious in one case - the martial arts points) or contained two dubious sources for a single line while lacking sources for the rest. I made a total of nine edits. The first removed a series of primary sources per WP:MEDRS and WP:PSTS. The second replaced a single primary source that was unrelated (it was about moxibustion) with a Cochrane review that was relevant. The third, fourth and fifth removed wholly unsourced content. The sixth added a very good reference. The seventh rewrote the lead per WP:LEAD to summarize the body, taking out a bunch of detailed information on FMRI that shouldn't be in the lead (and was replaced in my eighth edit that consolidated several sections). My ninth simply removed a red link and should be uncontroversial. I believe a substantive review of what I actually did would illustrate my edits were actually very solid ones (supported by Anthonyhcole and probably PPdd) even with an ongoing AFD - it's not fair to gut a page to an easily-deletable nub during the discussion, but removing blatantly inappropriate material while adding the kinds of sourcing that help a page survive, that seems well-within acceptable mores to me. Taking it from 26K, half of which was unsourced, to 10K of solidly-sourced, policy and guideline-appropriate material, really seems like a good thing to do at any time, even during an AFD. I won't be taking any further action until the AFD has closed, I just would like the positive changes I have made to be kept.
With my tendency to beat dead horses with walls of text, I'll stop here but if you do take the time to look at the changes I made in substance, I hope you'll agree they genuinely do improve the page, even if they do appear in rapid succession. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 12:34, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Nice walls, WLU, but mine are bigger because this is where i drink my coffee from[3].
I understand Dicklyons frustration with my own edits not. Trying to follow step by step each of WLU's edits takes a lot of time, so my own greater series of steps is worse. However, WLU's edits are all valid, and the time taken to read them, meticulously edit summarized, is not a reason to revert them. Editors all have different backgrounds and move at different speeds.
I have to admit that I am at an advantage over Dicklyon in that I have now seen many of WLU's edits on a step by step basis, and I don't think I ever disagreed with one, even when they reverted my own edit, as WLU's edit summary or talk page entry was dispositive. So when I saw WLU's multiple edits at this article, I was able to assume they were essentially the same as ones I had made since all my edits were based on learning from WLU and a couple of other editors, whereas Dicklyon had a lot of work to do reading. PPdd (talk) 14:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Dicklyon has a very good core point though - massive edits to pages that are under an AFD are normally not seen positively and 90% of the time they are bad edits that are made by an editor trying to get the page deleted. It was an unusual situation in that I deleted half the page, but then !voted "keep" on the remaining half. I can't criticize his argument even if I disagree with it. And the definition of a "valid" edit is always, always subject to question, revision, change and argument. If I thought Dicklyon was flat-out wrong, I would have reverted with a catty summary, but I didn't because he did raise a very good point, one I tried to address through the original posting in this section. Always remember that editors are doing their level best to improve the page, irrespective whether you agree with the edit or not, and all should have pointed out to them the reason why the edit may not be ideal. Dicklyon did so by referencing the practice of not deleting page content while it is being discussed at AFD, I'm trying to do the same thing here. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 14:39, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Great walls. OK. I did leave a catty edit summary when I reverted, and regretted it the moment I saw it in history. Sorry Dick. That was rude and insensitive of me. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:57, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Geodesics

In regard to your reversion of my edits to the articles on Geographical distance, Geodesy, and Gnomonic projection: The link I included is to an article which I have submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Judging from previous experience with this journal, the earliest that this is likely to be accepted is a year from now. I'm happy to wait before updating (by me or by someone else) these Wikipedia entries until then.

A larger problem is that there's no Wikipedia article on geodesics in the geographic context. The main Geodesic article is way off in the mathematical corner of the field. So the information on this subject is scattered awkwardly between Geodesy, Geographical distance, Great-circle distance, Haversine formula, and Vincenty's formulae. I would start this article myself except that I don't really have the time at present.

P.S. I encourage you to download (and read!) my paper from http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1215

Cffk (talk) 13:08, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

You're missing my point. It's simply that your interest in this material makes you the wrong person to decide. Take it to the relevant talk pages, and let other editors decide. You'll find people there who are more able to do that than I am. Dicklyon (talk) 15:15, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Autopatrolled

Wikipedia Autoreviewer.svg

Hello, this is just to let you know that I have granted you the "autopatrolled" permission. This won't affect your editing, it just automatically marks any page you create as patrolled, benefiting new page patrollers. Please remember:

If you have any questions about the permission, don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, happy editing! Acalamari 15:34, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

[edit] (classes of) control systems

Dick Lyon, You appear to be intimately familiar with this article. Perhaps you could help me. The reference to "Logic and sequential controllers" maps to simply "Logic gate". Would you have any better suggestions on where in Wikipedia I can read about "Logic and sequential controllers"? It is after all a purportedly major class of control systems. Vonkje (talk) 03:27, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not really familiar with that class of control systems, or even what logic means there. But certainly shouldn't link to logic gate. Dicklyon (talk) 04:31, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
Richard,
Thanks so much for your prompt response. In my copious free time I plan to rework that paragraph that begins with:
"There are two common classes of control systems, .. logic or sequential controls, and ..",
to fit the more standard way control system design texts categorize these systems. More importantly, I will be citing my edits. Vonkje (talk) 18:36, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

[edit] Galleries

Thank you. That was a lot of work. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 14:16, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

The fingers just get into a rhythm sometimes... Dicklyon (talk) 20:03, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
I think I know the feeling. :-) __ Just plain Bill (talk) 21:24, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
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