User talk:Pcarbonn

Hello Pcarbonn, welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to join the community. Drop us a note at Wikipedia:New user log so we can meet you and help you get started. If you need editing help, visit Wikipedia:How to edit a page. For format questions, visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Newcomers' Village pump. And of course, feel free to talk with me or ask questions on my talk page. Enjoy! --Alex S 21:10, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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Hi there, I'm curious about the statement you made on Winner's curse that a Vickrey auction can reduce the winner's curse. The winner's curse is based on the fact that the winner of an auction will be the person whose estimate was highest. This will still be the case in a Vickrey auction, so how is the winner's curse reduced? Isomorphic 21:25, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)

My reasonning is that, because he pays the second-highest bid in a Vickrey auction, he loses less than if he paid the highest bid. Pcarbonn 07:15, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Timeline of technological discoveries ect.

Not to dampen your enthusiam about the science and technology timelines, but have you seen the list of years in science and all it's individual pages? I think it would be very difficult to create a timeline that included ALL the important scientific discoveries in every field of study without leaving out many crucial events. Generally, each of the sciences and technology fields has specific timelines, such as the timeline of low temperature technology and the timeline of biology and organic chemistry. If you'd like to continue making these timelines, I suggest you look at list of themed timelines for more ideas and to fully grasp the scope of the project you've assigned yourself. Gentgeen 12:01, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

thanks for the comment. My goal is not to list ALL discoveries, only the major, significant ones. I agree that drawing the line could be difficult some time. On the other hand, I find it useful to have a cross-subject timeline, because it shows different fields in parallel. Do you know if this has been attempted before ?

Scientific American

Sorry about the slow response; somehow the You Have Messages didn't get triggered.

Right, I'll check the Sci Am files & see what I find. Dandrake 22:31, Jun 23, 2004 (UTC)

Yes indeed, on page 84 of the July 1987 Scientific American there's an article on cold fusion. This, however, is muon-catalyzed fusion, the approach that was getting some research attention before F & P came on the scene. The existence of this form of cold fusion is not questioned, but it's very far from producing energy; the authors were arguing for optimism (and, of course, further research) concerning improvements by enough orders of magnitude to produce a useful energy source. It doesn't seem to have panned out so far. Dandrake 06:38, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)

To-do lists

See Talk:Train station for a current example of where a to-do list would be useful! Zoney 13:41, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hah. Figured out how to add a to-do list - nice work. Easy to do (no pun intended) really! The automatic adding to Category:Todo is nice too, although will that not get scarily huge if the project takes off? Zoney 13:58, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, this could become an issue. The idea would be to show the popular articles first. This would be measure by the number of articles that link to them (like Google does). So the top ones would be the one to work on, because many people would be likely to see it. I have started a discussion on Village Pump on this this morning. It will probably require some developments on Wiki though. Pcarbonn 14:45, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sorry about the numbers

Hi, just wanted to apologize for removing your priority #s from the talk pages. I had just figured out how to alphabetize the todo category, but it required saving each talk page with the new template version. In the process of saving them i removed the numbers, because I thought they were only for organization (should have read the Wikipedia talk:Todo list page first. Anyways, if we decide to go back to some sort of organization by priority, I will replace your numbers (or fix it to whatever it will be), since I made the mistake. (also see my comments on Wikipedia talk:Todo list) —siroχo 22:28, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)

Black Body Radiation & Cavities

I have replied to your discussion question. I think one of your previous edits is wrong.

Dutch Wikipedia symposium in Rotterdam (27/11/2004)

Hi,

As a personal initiative I want to mention to you http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Symposium/Najaar_2004

There have been some voices that Dutch-speaking Belgian wikipedians might be underrepresented at that venue, so I took the liberty to post this message on the talk page of all people I found on Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Belgium.

If this doesn't apply to you (e.g. while French-speaking, or not interested in Dutch wikipedia,...) simply ignore this message.

--Francis Schonken 09:38, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wikinations

I'm afraid I can't help out on this. I'm just too involved in botanical pages, especially the orchids. JoJan 22:08, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Cold fusion

My reading on the discrepancy between half the reviewers being somewhat convinced that there's excess energy, and a sound majority rejecting the hypothesis that fusion has occured is as follows—hopefully I've understood your question correctly. In order to claim that a new form of an old process has occured, it must have some similarities with the old process. Nuclear fusion (as traditionally known) produces other products 10 million times more than Helium-4, when helium-4 is the only possible product that's been detected (and not abundantly or reliably, as I understand it). Nuclear fusion (as traditionally known) is a particle interaction, and therefore produces high-energy photons which could be detected—and aren't. Yes, one can argue low-energy nuclear fusion is different, but that doesn't mean much without a theoretical model explaining such changes, and the existing theoretical models say that the fusion product ratios should still be vastly against He-4 at low energies. If there's an excess of energy, but nobody knows the source, and efforts to connect it to nuclear fusion have failed in many ways, why not call it a new/unknown process rather than assuming it's the same thing?

As you may be seeing from the article talk page, working with User:JedRothwell on the article is extremely difficult. I do not think he cares to have a good grasp of WP:NPOV, and he has far more spare time to argue about this article than I do. Any help you can offer would be appreciated. -- SCZenz 16:03, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

It's not that I think there's something strange going on with cold fusion, it's that a significant number of scientists think there's something strange going on—and a notable minority think it's cold fusion. Their views should certainly be reported, but not as fact or as mainstream views. The tone of the article at this moment is quite derisive of, and sparse with, its coverage of the so-called "skeptic" position.

Anyway, you can copy whatever you like to the discussion page. However, as I just wrote there, I do not expect JedRothwell to accept an NPOV version of this article. If you are able to bring about an improvement in the situation, I would be delighted. -- SCZenz 14:37, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Cold fusion

Please see response here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JedRothwell#Cold_fusion

- JR

See my response to your response! - JR

I admire your sprit but . . . see latest response. - JR

See discussion. I explained how I hope to sway public opinion. Perhaps you know a better method? You can do it your way while I do it mine. That's the good cop, bad cop approach. - JR

Shooting fish in a barrel at Wikipedia

I wrote this message on a cold fusion discussion forum. I thought you might enjoy it.]

The cold fusion article at Wikipedia has grown too large, so it must be split up. Someone asked me to assist with the sub-article "cold fusion controversy." I should not waste my time on this sort of thing, but I did.

The skeptics will soon trash this and erase it, but I had a lot of fun writing it. Have a look before it is gone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion_controversy

I have a copy on my disk, preserved for posterity.

I did not set out to make this humorous, although I can never resist. I doubt the skeptics will see it as funny. But I trust the readers here will see the humor in parts such as my deadpan rebuttal of the claim that cold fusion researchers are insane; my description of Hoffman's masterpiece; and the juicy quote from Happer and its source (Taubes).

- Jed

Cold fusion controversy

It appears to me that Jed has created the cold fusion controversey article in an effort to remove criticism of cold fusion from the main article, using article size as an excuse, which is rather non-NPOV. I think the article should be made into a redirect. What do you think?

The size issue is because the original article was a bit redundant and bloated, and you seem to be dealing with it ok. -- SCZenz 01:05, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Maybe I've been a bit harsh on the controversy article, but it was very non-NPOV as it was before I turned it into a redirect, and Jed's comment above rather rubs me the wrong way. I still don't think we need a separate article for this, but I most definitely would like your opinion. -- SCZenz 06:24, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry: Jed is playing games on wikipedia, but is a nice person otherwise. So, feel free to be harsh with him too: he won't be offended. I started the cold fusion article some months ago, not Jed. It was done so that the controversy could be discussed in more details. Indeed, I'll try to merge it with the main article, assuming we can accept its large size. Pcarbonn 10:20, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't have time to verbally spar with him (or the inclination to withstand the unpleasantness of doing so), nor can I be effective at arguing when he knows the controversy in such detail. Frankly, I need the strong support of people who understand and are committed to WP:NPOV and the other fundamentals of Wikipedia. You seem to be such a person, so I'm hoping you can be more emphatic in your support of those principles. -- SCZenz 17:34, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Pcarbonn wrote: "Jed is playing games on wikipedia, but is a nice person otherwise." I do not play games on Wikipedia, and I am not a nice person. However, I do not go around erasing other people's contributions, and SCZenz does, so I would say he is no paragon of nicety. Also, I do not demand that he read my mind. If he thinks there are errors in the "Controversy" article he should fix them! I cannot know by ESP what he considers an error. It all looks okay to me. Of course many of the skeptical statements are intemperate and they sound bigoted, but that is because these people are intemperate and bigoted. That's their problem, not mine. You will not find any skeptical quotes which sound reasonable. --JedRothwell 18:54, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry ~guys, I'm no psychologists... Jed, I think that SCZenz recognizes that he went a bit overboard with the redirection. Can we leave it at that ? I'll look at the controversy article when I have some time. ~~

Please assist with "controversy" article

If you could check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion_controversy for ommissions and missing sources, I would appreciate it. It would look nicer with footnotes instead of citations in square brackets, but I do not recall how to make footnotes with Wikipedia.

I think the article is now too big to merge with "cold fusion." Also, it is mainly political, since it is entirely devoted to the skeptical views of cold fusion, which have no basis in fact, logic or experiment.

I do not understand why CZenz is upset by this, since I have carefully represented skeptical views and quoted their leaders verbatim. You'd think he would feel honored, and grateful that I have taken the time to summarize his views. Or did he expect me to go to this trouble and not include rebuttals? --JedRothwell 18:48, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I'll be happy to look for omissions and missing sources, but let me finish the main article first. I do want to remove the POV tag there first, and possibly even bring it back to Feature Article status, so that it can get more visibility. I'm not sure where the POV issue is with the content you have provided, but I'll look again when I can. In any case, the article is about the controversy: maybe there is too much of a focus on the extreme skeptical views. Pcarbonn 19:03, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! No rush. I would appreciate help with the format as well. If you want to make footnotes out of the comments in square brackets, I can fill them in with more detail such as page numbers. I can use my EndNote database.

"I'm not sure where the POV issue is with the content you have provided . . ." I honestly have no clue. I have quoted Huizenga and other mainstream sources, not the lunatic fringe skeptics.

"In any case, the article is about the controversy: maybe there is too much of a focus on the extreme skeptical views." I do not know of any less extreme skeptical views. There are only a few books. Actually, two of the big name skeptics are much more extreme. One claims that cold fusion researchers are engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to defraud the taxpayers. The other, the late D. Morrison, I have quoted sparingly. I left out Morrison's favorite hypothesis, which he called "the regionalization of results." He gave lectures on this long before cold fusion emerged. After cold fusion came along he included "regionalization" theory in several of his Internet newsletters, which are the original source of many skeptical claims at Sci. Am. and elsewhere.

You can look up his old newsletters or I can send you one, but to summarize very briefly, according to "regionalization" all good science comes from northern Europe and the northeast part of the US. Other geographical areas, such as Southern Europe and Asia, have contributed only mistakes, fraud and poor imitations of good science. He never stated whether this difference is caused by genetic or cultural factors, but since scientific culture and training is pretty much the same the world over, I suppose it must be genetic. It looks to me like a thinly disguised neo-Nazi ideology. I met Morrison several times. He was a creepy guy and I got the distinct impression that he was . . . "a feldgrau spook . . ." as a French friend of mine puts it. Anyway, most cold fusion researchers happen to be from Italy, Japan, China and other places outside of Northern Europe so they did not appreciate this. Morrison supported his hypothesis with what I would call questionable statistics, so I called his theory Aryan Science Numerology. He did not appreciate that.

There are some other unseemly anti-cold fusion movements out there, but I think we should ignore them and concentrate on the big guns at the DoE and the APS. --JedRothwell 20:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Someone directed me to the Wikipedia page on footnotes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes

I shall take a crack at this, tomorrow. --JedRothwell 21:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Move WaPost anywhere, or chop it

At Cold Fusion you wrote:

Washington Post: I'm in favor to move this sentence from the intro to lower down in the text

I may have moved it up again, inadvertently. Move it anywhere you like, or perhaps move it out into the Controversy section.

Jefffire came in earlier and deleted it altogether, along with a bunch of other stuff, without discussion, so I put it back where it was originally.

The guy is a big help. I cannot understand the psychology or background of such people. They readily admit they know little or nothing about a subject, yet they feel free to boldly edit what is clearly a controversial and complex discussion! Honestly, they seem cookoo to me. If someone caught me editing an article about some scientific development, and they forced me to admit that I had not read anything, and I really did not know much about it other than what anyone can read in the newspapers, I would feel mortified. I would apologize profusely and never touch the article again. (Not that I would ever do that in the first place.)

People seem to have no respect for authority, expertise or documented facts. Here is a hysterical article about that:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70670-0.html?tw=wn_index_19

QUOTE:

"But why should I contribute to an article [to Wikipedia]? I'm no expert.

That's fine. The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: 'Experts are scum.' For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment."

--JedRothwell 17:08, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

I love it. It's great ! Our role is educating them, but it will never end. We should see this as a game, I suppose. Have you seen that Joke did not appear again in the discussion ? I think he ran out of arguments. Hopefully he got something out of what we said. I'll move the wired article to the cold fusion: I guess you won't be offended. Pcarbonn 17:16, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

It is funny. Why on earth would I be offended?

I expect Joke is recharging his batteries or preparing for an onslaught against the Controversy section. Jefffire promises he will take the ax to it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cold_fusion_controversy

I honestly cannot understand why these skeptics are so upset about the Controversy section. It merely repeats the arguments they themselves have made, such as the claim that cold fusion violates theory and therefore it cannot be true. Do they expect me to write something like that and not include the CF researchers' rebuttal? --JedRothwell 18:12, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Could not figure out how to revert, thanks

Thank you for reverting the wholesale changes in "Controversy." I was just trying to figure out how to do that, when you did it.

I will have to read the Wikipedia instructions for that, where ever they are. That fellow Jefffire does not seem inclined to discuss matters before making decisions unilaterally.

Anyway, he and the others will be back. The article will soon be erased. Wikipedia is like graffiti; someone soon overwrites it. --JedRothwell 18:37, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Please revert again when you get a chance, or tell me how to do it. I cannot figure it out, even though I have been dealing with computers for 35 years. --JedRothwell 19:11, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I looked up how to revert. Not so hard after all. I should shut up and read the instructions. --JedRothwell 19:16, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks

I just though I'd let you know that I am extremely grateful for your contributions and comments on the article even though we often disagree. My hope is that by working together we will be able to make this article shine agains and one day reclaim it's featured article status. Keep up the good work. Jefffire 13:03, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Getting to NPOV will already be a good result... :-) I certainly see a danger of going POV on the other side. Pcarbonn 14:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, thank you (and other involved editors)! This work really restored my faith in wikipedia... Zarniwoot 11:44, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your praise.Pcarbonn 15:59, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Award

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For your excellent work on Cold Fusion in providing factual information as well as maintaining neutrality I hereby award you the Barnstar of Diligence. Wear it with pride, User:Pcarbonn! Jefffire 14:36, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Jeff ! Pcarbonn 15:10, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

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A little help

I'm sorry it took for me to chip in but things seem to have calmed down a little now any way. i'll keep an eye on things and do a light review of the article as it stands. Any controversial suggestions will be posted on the talk page first. It is nice to be dealing with scientists on a page. The science section on astrology for example has deteriorated markedly due to a non-scientist pushing POV, but that's another matter. Jefffire 13:11, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

The Wikipedian Who Turned Into A Parrot

I dabbled with Corentin Louis Kervran again but I am not a scientist by any standard. I just happen to have some of his books at hand. I was right to be bold however since that is how I came to know you, Pcarbonn, an asset by many standards. So, I put a note at Talk:Corentin Louis Kervran and changed some text accordingly. An expert opinion is much needed.

How I wish I were a Nightingale !

(Lunarian 17:39, 1 August 2006 (UTC))

Cold fusion history

Did you do this cut-and-paste? - brenneman ^{L} 16:07, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

yes, I did. I'm working on cutting down the history section of cold fusion. Why the question ?Pcarbonn 16:08, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I misunderstood what you were doing, and was worried about GFDL compliance. - brenneman ^{L} 16:25, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Kervran?

In the Ig Nobel Prize I read: "The ceremony is followed a few days later by the Ig Informal Lectures (...) in which laureates have the opportunity to explain their achievement ...", do we know who spoke for Corentin Louis Kervran or was it left unfair to award him posthumeously ? (Lunarian 12:59, 8 August 2006 (UTC))

I don't know. I just found this info in my reading, and thought it should be added.Pcarbonn 16:38, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

It's fun, anyway. Santé ! (Lunarian 22:30, 8 August 2006 (UTC))

'quantum mechanics is not a superset of quantum electrodynamics'

Um. It so is dude.

QED is the theory of quantum mechanics as it applies to light, (in other words, photons, electrons and protons); but it doesn't cover quarks (see QCD for that).

The idea that it isn't part of quantum mechanics and thus quantum mechanics isn't a superset is unbelievable. Do you have a cite for that?WolfKeeper 19:55, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I was using "quantum mechanics" in the narrow, non-relativistic sense: in that sense, QED is not a subset of QM. If you take "quantum mechanics" as a synonym of quantum physics, and I now realize that many do, then you must indeed say that QED is a subset of QM.

I'm afraid that Wikipedia is not consistent on this, hence the debate here. In the lead section of the quantum mechanics article: "Quantum mechanics is a subset of quantum field theory". Hence my edit. However, I now see that "It should be noted, however, that certain authors refer to "quantum mechanics" in the more restricted sense of non-relativistic quantum mechanics" (in the quantum mechanics article too). Pcarbonn 20:50, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I have now changed the lead section of the quantum mechanics section to clarify this ambiguity. Pcarbonn 20:58, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

reverted your comments at cold fusion talk

Please don't inject commentary into the middle of other people's comments. It screws up coherence, it's confusing because I'd also used indentation, and it's inconsiderate. I've reverted your edit. I would have simply moved your comments down, and I will if you'd like, but I assume that you'd want to handle this yourself. –M^T 22:04, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

AfD raised on Quantum theory

If you have view on this please go to Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Quantum_theory and cast your vote / make your opinions known. --Michael C. Price ^talk 06:07, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Quantum mechanics vs. physics

I'm a bit puzzled by this edit, which has left the stub category name inconsistent with the permanent category, the article name, and doesn't seem to tally with any discussion on the matter -- and most certainly never went near WP:SFD, which is the normal venue for dealing with such matters. Would you have any objection to me restoring this? Alai 04:30, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Reply to: source for cold fusion ?

That quote is also from the 1997 New York Times piece that is referenced after the second quote, sorry that was unclear. That reference was intended to refer to both sentences previous to it. I wish that the /ref code collapsed identical entries into the same number, but as it doesn't I don't want to clutter the section with many repeats of the same reference. The only sentence ccuring between the two in the original article was "Now Japan is also throwing in the towel." I suppose it could be made into one longer quote, but particularly in the intro I thought brevity was better. Using quotations is itself awkward, but in the past critical material that was not a direct quote has been deleted or edited to unrecognizability- it is my hope that a properly referenced quotation will be more durable. --Noren 18:01, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Weasel words in cold fusion

brilliant move to identify the "weasel" words - nice job STemplar 17:27, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Pcarbonn 19:16, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Re: where did "cold fusion/tmp" go ?

As I believe I said, before, I moved it to Talk:Cold fusion/tmp because the main namespace doesn't support subpages. Apologies if I didn't make that clear enough. Luna Santin 21:19, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

the current dispute with ScienceApologist

Thanks for the idea on the Storms article. I'll pass. This will all come out in the wash. At some point in the not too distant future, ScienceApologist will wake up and realize why (smarter) mainstream science is remaining quiet on this debate and he/she will find some other Earth to declare flat.