User talk:William M. Connolley: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 14:39, 13 February 2007

I'm fairly busy in the Real World at the moment. Expect delays here... or not. But it's my excuse anyway...

You are welcome to leave messages here. I will reply here (rather than on, say, your user page). Conversely, if I've left a message on your talk page, I'm watching it, so please reply there.

If your messages are rude, wandering or repetitive I will likely edit them. If you want to leave such a message, put it on your talk page and leave me a note here & I'll go take a look. In general, I prefer to conduct my discussions in public. If you have a question for me, put it here (or on the article talk, or...) rather than via email. If I've blocked you for 3RR this applies particularly strongly: your arguments for unblock, unless for some odd reason particularly sensitive, should be made in public, on your talk page. See-also WMC:3RR.

In the dim and distant past were... /The archives. As of about 2006/06, I don't archive, just remove. Thats cos I realised I never looked in the archives.

Atmospheric circulation pic

Thanks for the pic you added to this article. It's very interesting, and I am intrigued by some of the anomalies it shows. Denni ☯ 01:00, 21 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Denni. Thanks! All part of my very very slow atmospheric dynamics project... more to come... slowly... William M. Connolley 22:09, 24 October 2005 (UTC).[reply]

RRS John Biscoe

I've justed created a stub for this article and found you'd already done the same for her successor, the James Clark Ross. Great! Do you have (access to) a Commons/Wikipedia-compliant photo of the Biscoe that could be used? Apologies in advance if my search failed to turn one up.
Best wishes, David Kernow 15:22, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't; I'll ask around a bit William M. Connolley 17:23, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. If no joy, or too much hassle, I'm hopeful one or other of the Antarctica websites with photos might give permission or adopt a Commons/Wikipedia-friendly licence. David Kernow 22:20, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Trend Estimation with Auto-Correlated Data

William: This article you started is a great topic! I am just wondering if you have detailed information to add to the section about auto-correlated data. I am facing this problem now, and am trying to get information from papers and textbooks. --Roland 21:46, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Ah well, IMHO what to do with auto-correlated data is an ongoing research topic. Top tip: divide the ndof by something like (1+ac1) (or is it ac1^2...) if the autocorr isn't too extreme. There is some formula like (1+ac1^2+ac2^2+...) if its strongly auto-correlated... but... its a bit of a mess, I think. Err, thats why I never expanded that bit. The von Zstorch and Zwiers book covers it, somewhat. William M. Connolley 22:54, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I added a link to autoregressive moving average models JQ 23:17, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Linda Hall editor

User:204.56.7.1 has been blocked four times in the last month for 3RR (once by you). He is now performing wholsale reversions without comment (see at Radio [1]) This user as you probably know, has a long history of refusing to collaborate. He ignored my talk page request. Any suggestions? --Blainster 20:33, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My feeling is that 204. is Reddi. Reddi is limited to 1R per week. Establishing the connection past doubt is difficult; but the edit patterns are very similar. You could post a WP:RFCU. Or you could just list 204. on the 3RR page together with the note of Reddis arbcomm parole and see if that does any good. Or maybe I'll just block it... shall I? Oh go on, yes I will... William M. Connolley 21:37, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My Reddimeter displays 8.5 on a scale from 0 to 10: Selection of topics. likes patents, likes templates. Only the tireless lamenting on article talk pages is missing. --Pjacobi 21:43, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Reddi apparently back

... with another sockpuppet [2] KarlBunker 19:25, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is there no stopping him? I've blocked that one; if he persists, will semi it William M. Connolley 19:28, 10 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And to think

..I knew you when. Why didn't you mention this?

KNOW IT ALL - Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? KillerChihuahua^?!? 16:38, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh dear. I did my best with them :-( William M. Connolley 17:31, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WP:AN3

The few times that I've dabbled in WP:ANI/3RR, I've tried to be fair, but I universally get hit with a barrage of malcontents on my talk page and others that send me threatening e-mails. I don't know why you continue to take care of this for us, but thank you for doing so, as I know that I wouldn't be able to last more than a day at it. Many thanks -- Samir धर्म 14:23, 12 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you :-) William M. Connolley 16:36, 12 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Templeton Foundation

The Templeton Foundation used to provide grants for ID conferences and courses. According to The New York Times, Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, later asked ID proponents to submit proposals for actual research. "They never came in," said Harper, and that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said. [3] The Templeton Foundation has since rejected the Discovery Institute's entreaties for more funding, Harper states. "They're political - that for us is problematic," and that while Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth." [4]

I'd think that while individual members/beneficiaries of the Foundation's largess may embrace ID, the the Foundation itself is trying to distance itself from the ID movement, but keeping in mind that the Discovery Institute, the hub of the ID movement, actively tries to cultivate ambiguity around its own motives, actions and members with the aim of portraying ID as more substantial and more widely accepted than it actually is, as the Dover Trial ruling shows (it's worth reading). [5] FeloniousMonk 21:24, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Thats interesting and useful William M. Connolley 21:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Improving the models

I find this to be a fascinating example of the improvement of weather models over time. Do you happen to know of any comparable quantitative metrics by which climate models can be seen to have improved over time? Dragons flight 07:06, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nice pic. The one I'm more used to seeing is the length-of-useful-forecast graph, which shows similar improvement. However... no I don't know comparable pics from climate models. The obvious problem would be that you can't do it year-on-year, climate models being far less frequent: the hadley center has arguably only had 3 model incarnations. They do have a "model index" which finds that hadgem1 is better than hadcm3, but I don't know if that was ever applied back to hadcm2, much less to other centres William M. Connolley 13:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

when you say 3 models, does that include or exclude improvements in spatial resolution as computing power has improved? Dragons flight 16:48, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I meant hadcm2, hadcm3 and hadgem1. There are others, but it could get complex. Do you want to include atmos-only models? Those are the "official" releases, sort of. There are various experiments with different spatial res, but its not clear if those were meant to be improvements... William M. Connolley 17:27, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well at the moment I am just sort of curious about what is being labeled a "model". I could see the term being used to refer to either a set of coupled differential equations (which might then be implemented on a variety of different grid sizes), or to a specific implementation on a specific grid size. Do you ever take your differential systems, and leaving them as is, try to increase the number of grid elements through the use of more powerful computers? Dragons flight 17:40, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes and no. "GCM" means the full set of code, on the whole. Ie, big set of PDEs and params on top. But also, in general, it means a specific config and setup. "hadcm3" means a given code version, plus given ancils (e.g. land sea mask), plus a given resolution. You *can* run it at, say, higher rez; but there is no guarantee that its better. But yes, I know there were various projects with higher rez versions... the problem is that because of the about grid^3-4 dependency, you can't run much higher rez, if the model is anywhere close to state-of-the-art William M. Connolley 22:52, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Would you consider the edit below to be vandalism, exempt from 3RR?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Landmark_Education&curid=113183&diff=91946832&oldid=91916187 Sm1969 07:57, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Only marginally so, better dealt with by consensus of editors. Definitely not encyclopeadic, of course William M. Connolley 13:25, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

SPM

Can we give Summary for policymakers a decent burial? Or even an indecent one? Is there a protocol to follow, or can I just move the (very small amount of) useful information in the article somewhere else? It's been tagged for merger several months now. Raymond Arritt 04:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget what links to it... [6]

Gack. Is there no automagic way of taking care of such things? Raymond Arritt 22:28, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well if you replaced it with a redirect to IPCC it would be transparent. I quite like the existence of a separate SPM page, myself William M. Connolley 22:35, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I know I've given you one before, but...

		The Working Man's Barnstar
		For doing a task that makes me grind my teeth just thinking about it, this star is for you! Syrthiss 22:55, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ah well, thanks even more :-) William M. Connolley 09:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

)

Just for amusement

AfDing articles on people can be quite interesting. This one for example: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jules Siegel has written far more in the AfD debate than he ever did in the article he wrote about himself... He may well be notable but... --BozMo talk 20:20, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm well. I don't think I'll vote William M. Connolley 20:57, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No. But smile perhaps. He probably deserves to stay but the indignation is disproportionate to the point of entertaining--BozMo talk 21:28, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I learnt my lesson at William Connolley a long time ago and now stay away William M. Connolley 21:42, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, yes. BTW I have some nice (low res) pics of the family of baby stoats which live in my garden which I might send you for your blog. They are very playful. --BozMo talk 21:50, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Delightful! I'm very jealous. Do send the pic. In return, I could start a stub about an ex-oilman turned charity exec. Err, or I could *not* start it in exchange... William M. Connolley 21:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not. Okay, I will find some pics/small vid clips) on the other PC and email them, probably tomorrow. As for the threat... I have enough scientific publications to pass WP:BIO and not enough appetite for it to knit a baby gnat's sock "like I want a wart in the middle of my forehead" I think is the expression. We also boast some baby owls, bats in our attic, three varieties of deer, hares, rabbit and badgers in the garden but no pics yet. Glorious Suffolk. --BozMo talk 22:17, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

okay try http://catesfamily.org.uk/stoats.jpg and then in a couple of minutes stoatsclip.mov from the same place. First is 2M second is 6M. --BozMo talk 23:00, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Cute or what! I'm now insanely jealous. When I blog them, do you want (or unwant) attribution and/or copyright? William M. Connolley 23:07, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Any copyleft with attribution to my homepage would be kind (but I wouldn't insist). I notice Stoat has no picture and will put a cut jpg up there. I think the way that they bounce around in the movie is quite informative and if you can find a way to get that into Wikipedia format you are welcome to aswell. I don't have the tools. --BozMo talk 09:42, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

stoats again

Aha! The userbox on your userpage has the deleted stoat image in it. You could update the box with the new one. I'd do it if I could work out where these silly boxes live. --BozMo talk 14:38, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The press

William,

I'm a reporter working on a story about Wikipedians that monitor pages that could be considered controversial or ideologically charged. I'm wondering if you'd be interested in talking a bit. You can get me here : matt.phillips@wsj.com.

And thanks,

Matt

Hi. Feel free to email me - the wiki mail works William M. Connolley 21:22, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Global warming question for William

Hi William, if you are reading this, could you spare a minute to answer a query on global warming? I am considering adding an article on the apparent retreat of polar ice on Mars. There are articles out there by scientists like this one for example 1 that claim this is evidence of increased solar radiation. There does seem to be agreement at Nasa as far as I have been able to discover on the internet that Mars polar caps have been retreating since close-up observations began with Viking. Do you know anything about this, can you comment? Do you think such an article would be useful? Thanks. MarkThomas 20:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is nothing to do with GW on earth, as the RC article makes clear, I would have hoped. I've edited thte page a little. There was similar text on the Mars page itself but it seems to have vanished William M. Connolley 21:21, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, "RC" article? Which page is that please? I guess my starting point is why climate scientists would assume that polar cap reduction on Mars automatically meant nothing in terms of Earth warming - agreed Mars does not have CO2-based warming but might it not be external evidence of increased solar radiation? MarkThomas 09:12, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind, MarkThomas, most editors to an article are uneducated on the topic and often mistakenly make edits of other users that contain merit. This admin, in particular, is unfamiliar with many of Wikipedia's policies. ~ UBeR 23:18, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pot. Kettle. Black. Raul654 02:23, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I don't understand what these last two comments are about - can you elucidate please? Thanks. MarkThomas 09:12, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Lord knows what UBeR means. What *I* meant was Martian global warming which I thought you would have found... William M. Connolley 10:10, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's great, thanks William - actually couldn't find that in WP or from Google searches. Is the ringing conclusion on that page a POV? I find it puzzling that climate scientists seem so uninterested in this, since it appears to be external evidence of solar radiation increase devoid of earth-based variables. Is this something you've looked into and therefore have reasons to discount? Very little good quality stuff on the web about it outside of sceptic-mongers and Nasa seem not to be drawing conclusions. Just curious what the "view" is within the climate change community. MarkThomas 10:19, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why would you look for evidence of solar radiation changes via an indirect proxy like Martian ice caps, when we have direct measurements since the satellite era, which show no trend? William M. Connolley 10:25, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Direct measurements of Mars climate you mean? Or Earth? MarkThomas 10:27, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh sorry, just twigged, presume you mean direct measurements of solar radiation? Is that quite right - I thought from casual reading of New Scientist over the years that solar radiation variability is hard to calculate accurately for various reasons and past measurements are not very reliable. MarkThomas 10:30, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it's this 1 that I need to be reading, if I could get in! The precis seems to suggest that satellite-based measurements of solar radiation shows it decreasing to 1990 and then increasing since then. I don't see how this can be irrelevant to Mars and the Earth as you confidently claim on the Mars article. MarkThomas 10:37, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your Science link is ab out *sfc* solar radiation. Why read New Scientist when you can read Solar variation? Yes there are problems piecing the data together, but far far smaller than those of using the martian polar caps as proxies, of course William M. Connolley 10:41, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed Solar Radiation is an excellent article and I'm getting into it! Thanks for your input. I am still concerned by the apparent easy consensus that Mars reduction in polar ice is unrelated to the polar ice reduction on Earth, and why (since this takes out the variable of human involvement) this is not strongly indicative that recent global warming on earth might be a solar phenomenon, albeit exacerbated by anthropic activity. It appears superficially to be very compelling that the latter is true, given that Mars has no oceans (although there could of course be substantial subsurface water) and no active volcanoes, thin atmosphere, etc. Will read up on it more and see if I can make a useful edit on Mars Global Warming, which BTW might be better called "Mars Polar Cap Size Reduction"? MarkThomas 12:33, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of scientists, and non-scientists, would like to dismiss data that would be contrary to their hypotheses, such as the mongers at Global Warming. ~ UBeR 17:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not very interested in recycled auto-scepticism, I've found most of the "climate sceptics" appear to be confused or mistaken in various ways. As far as I can tell from the available information on the web, the Mars polar cap data does not appear to go back far enough to be really useful yet, but from the data available it does seem to show a warming trend and due to increased solar radiation. This also appears as far as I can tell to be dismissed by climate scientists. Not sure why yet, although there must be reasons. MarkThomas 18:01, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Which is why I recommend reading the RC article, which was written by an astronomer, and will point out the various reasons why it has no relevance to GW William M. Connolley 19:37, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Request block

Hi. 206.173.87.66 has repeatedly removed content from Congress of Racial Equality. A block is in order, I think. JQ 23:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Looks very occaisional to me. Are you sure? William M. Connolley 09:35, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Islamophobia - user Netscott

Would you have a look at my comment on this user's talk page at some point? At some point, I may need another admin to have an objective look at what he is doing here. Unfortunately, I made a technical error a day or two ago, which no one else caught, and for which I am kicking myself. This stuffed up the formatting of the notes on the Islamophobia article. When I realised, I reverted to the last version before my error, with the aim of retracing my steps from that point. This seemed the simplest way to go. Most of the edits not made by me were just vandalism and reversions of vandalism, but there are also some other changes, all of which look like dubious PoV material that the article would be better without. Rather than adding back any specific material that he thought useful, Netscott has reverted to a version with the formatting errors.

I'm not asking you to do anything at the moment, but sorting this out might be difficult and I don't trust Netscott to be cooperative about it, given the nature of some of the material that he seems to want to protect. Obviously, I don't want to use any admin powers in my own interests if it does get nasty, so I'm just asking that you might at some future stage be available to have a look over the situation as an uninvolved admin. Metamagician3000 02:43, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My only contention in this whole affair was the deceptive edit summary by Metamagician3000 of "self-revert" when in fact his revert was more than a mere self-revert. (→Netscott) 03:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly don't accept that there was any deception involved, but we seem to have settled our differences. :) Metamagician3000 04:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, deceptive was too strong of a word a better word would have been misleading... William M. Connolley if you are interested in fully reading Metamagician3000 and my discussion have a look at this section of his talk page. Take it easy. (→Netscott) 05:06, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If this is now settled, as it seems to be, I'll leave it William M. Connolley 09:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Blocks and Paroles

You applied an editing block to my account, and cited parole violation as the reason. I am requesting detailed information regarding this parole, when I was put on this parole and what I did to violate this parole. You provided a link to a page that, as I previously explained, does not apply to me. I would like to have this situation corrected as soon as possible. Additionally, any direction you could give as to how to best clear this up would be appreciated. Thank you, Xenophrenic 07:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It seems likely that it applies to you. If you want this cleared up, you'll have to go back to the RFCU page. In the meantime, I suggest that you edit as though it did apply to you William M. Connolley 09:22, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

your previous life.

You are active on a number of science entries where you make referece to your scientific credentials listed here.

You make a curious reference to a former life as a mathematician.

Could you clarify your position held at SEH Oxford ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 90.144.113.77 (talk) 14:34, 13 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

@@ Line 219: / Line 219: @@
 You are active on a number of science entries where you make referece to your scientific credentials listed here.
-You have curious reference to a former life as a mathematician.
+You make a curious reference to a former life as a mathematician.
 Could you clarify your position held at SEH Oxford ? <small>—The preceding [[Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages|unsigned]] comment was added by [[Special:Contributions/90.144.113.77|90.144.113.77]] ([[User talk:90.144.113.77|talk]]) 14:34, 13 February 2007 (UTC).</small><!-- HagermanBot Auto-Unsigned -->