User talk:Shimmin

Hello from Mav149

Hello and Welcome! Great work on Thorne-Zytkow object! --mav

Names of People

Please see my comments on Talk:Sharaku about your name change; see also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). for the standard Wiki policy on names. Noel 04:33, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)

PS: By the way, I actually agree with you that it would preferable to file articles for people under their full names, with redirects from "common" names to the article. Alas, that's not the policy on the Wikipedia (as I found out painfully when I tried to reorganize the Medici pages into rational order). So now I dutifully file articles under the most common form of the name, even when I really don't like it (e.g. see my comments on the Talk:Toyokuni page. Noel 16:17, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Names of Chemicals

I've been away for a few days, just seen your message. My recollection is that the convention is to use the IUPAC name unless there the substance is almost invariably known by the common name (like water) - can't rember where it says that though. jimfbleak 15:08, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Names of Schismatic Religious Institutions

Hi there. Just a short note to say that your change of true Catholic Church to True Catholic Church was incorrect and I have changed it back. It deliberately lowercases the word true in its name. The first letter of a link is not case specific, though unfortunately in the actual title is automatically begun on our pages with in upper case, which causes problems for things like iMac, eMac, tCC, etc that use the lowercase. But the text of the article on the tCC makes it clear that the word true in the church name is lowercase. FearÉIREANN 20:52, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Complaint about Death in Canada

Hello, why did you delete the stuff realted to Canada in the death aticle? Also why did you mark that change as a minor edit? - SimonP 22:14, Aug 26, 2003 (UTC)

Multics and ASCII-1963

Your recent edit of new line does not match with my recollection of what Jerry Saltzer (who designed the Multics I/O system) told me. (However, my archives only contained my half of the conversation so I don't have a direct record of what he actually said.) He briefly described the process of converting all of the Multics source code from 1963 to 1968 ASCII (which was stored on the Project MAC CTSS system, which used a different coding system, because they didn't have the GE 645 hardware yet) and having to redo all of the compilers and other text-processing utilities to know the new code for line termination. I suspect you could find details of this in old Project MAC technical reports. If I remember, I can ask Jerry or Corby next time I see one of them. 18.24.0.120 05:28, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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While I certainly defer to your source's knowledge of Multics, the story does not jibe with published standard for ASCII-1963, which does not contain a separate codepoint for newline.

In 1963 ISO's draft standard said:

The controls CR and LF are intended for printer equipment which requires separate combinations to return the carriage and feed a line.

As an alternative, for equipment which uses a single combination for a combined carriage-return and line-feed operation (called New-Line), NL will be coded at F 2 or FE 2 [i.e., 6-bit 0/2 or 7-bit 0/10, LF]. Then F 5 [6-bit 0/5, CR] will be regarded as a Spare Control, and FE 5 [7-bit 0/13, CR] will be regarded as Backspace BS.

If the latter type of equipment has to inter-work with the former, it may be necessary to take steps to introduce the CR character.

But ASA's standard made no such provision. In 1967 John Booth (who was AT&T's representative on the ASCII committee, and so may have known about Multics) proposed that LF as NL be allowed in the American standard, but he only got the following compromise language which appeared for the first time in USASI's 1968 standard:

Where appropriate, this character may also have the meaning "New Line" (NL), a format effector which controls the movement of the printing position to the first printing position on the next printing line. Use of this convention requires agreement between sender and recipient of data.

Booth tried again in 1972 to make 0x0a primarily a newline character, rather than a codepoint that could be used as a newline with prior agreement bewteen parties, but this change, while existing in some drafts for a revised ASCII, did not make it into the 1977 standard.

So basically, there never was a standalone newline character in any version of ASCII, and LF is the only character with even approximately this meaning.

Since your source worked on I/O code, perhaps his complaints related to EBCDIC, which Multics would have had to convert to if it wished to output to an IBM peripheral. Many versions of EBCDIC do contain all of CR, LF, and NL.

Thanks for the details. Hopefully next time I run into Jerry and/or Corby I can put this question to them directly. 18.24.0.120 06:22, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Galileo and the telescope

If he did not invent it, who did? He certainly improved the quality of the instrument (he learnt lens-grinding painstakingly to do so), and was the the first to point it skyward. Lenses were "invented" in Holland, that much I know...

Urhixidur 01:33, 2004 Jul 29 (UTC)

The telescope was invented in the Dutch Republic, probably in late August or early September of 1608. No one knows who exactly deserves credit. A Dutch newspaper briefly mentions the new device being shown off to visiting dignitaries on 10 September 1608, and in the last week of September, three different lensmakers all applied to the Dutch government for patents on the device. Hans Lippershey's application made it in first. None of the patents were granted. Also in the last week of September 1608, a telescope was for sale in Frankfurt. Galileo heard about the instrument through diplomatic correspondence, and from the descripton given, set about constructing his own instruments sometime early in 1609. By the fall of that year, he had built a 10x instrument, which was almost certainly the most powerful in the world at the time.

As for being the first to point it skyward, sorry again. It's simply a natural thing to do if you have one, and that same 10 September 1608 news report lists the skies as among the objects viewed by those first known telescope users. In June 1609, Thomas Harriot made a sketch of the moon as seen through a 3-power scope, and Galileo did not make any record of his lunar observations until October.

By fall of 1609, Galileo did have the best telescopes in the world, and his Siderius Nuncius (March 1610) was the first scientific treatise based on telescopic observations, but the evidence simply does not support crediting him with either inventing the telescope or making the first telescopic astronomical observations.

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Please add licence information by the picture Image:Formic-acid.png.Thanks.--Van Flamm 14:39, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

beta Systemic Bias section

Hi, if you wish to help contribute to a beta version of a Wikipedia page section designed to counter-act Wikipedia's systemic bias, please sign the bottom of this section on the Village pump - Wikipedia:Village_pump#Systemic_bias_in_Wikipedia. If not, no worries.--Xed 03:52, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Pudding/puddling

I've reverted your change to Pudding furnace for the moment while I do some research. On first glance, your change may seem correct, but Google seems to say otherwise (unless they are all mirrors of Wikipedia). I'll do some research to see if one outweighs the other, and if there is appropriate etymology. Noisy | Talk 22:08, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

Vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote

Hi. Since you have edited on pages with disputes about the names of Polish/German locations, I would invite you to vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote to settle the multi-year dozens-of-pages dispute about the naming of Gdansk/Danzig and other locations. The vote has two parts, one with questions when to use Gdansk/Danzig, and a second part affecting articles related to locations with Polish/German history in general. An enforcement is also voted on. The vote has a total of 10 questions to vote on, and ends in two weeks on Friday, March 4 0:00. Thank you -- Chris 73 Talk 00:42, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)