User talk:DOwenWilliams

Welcome!

Welcome to Wikipedia, DOwenWilliams! I am EWikist and have been editing Wikipedia for quite some time. Thank you for your contributions. I just wanted to say hi and welcome you to Wikipedia! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page or by typing {{helpme}} at the bottom of this page. I love to help new users, so don't be afraid to leave a message! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome!

EW_{_i}kist^Talk 14:17, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 20:06, 3 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Equation of time

Would you please add a citation to Equation of time to explain what reliable source you obtained the QBasic program from? Jc3s5h (talk) 19:46, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(Reply copied to more appropriate place)

You sent me a note asking for a source of the QBasic routine I posted on the Equation of Time page. The short answer is, the source is in my head. I wrote the code myself. It is taken from a much longer program called ETIMSDEC, which can be found, along with a whole lot of explanation and other related material. at [Link]. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Run ETIMSDEC, and you'll see how accurate it is!

I have studied solar stuff for several decades, and also pride myself on being a competent programmer. I assure you that what I posted is good stuff.

DOwenWilliams (talk) 20:33, 24 August 2010 (UTC) David Williams[reply]

Thank you for your reply. Just so you know in the future, comments about other users should be made on the user's talk page, such as User talk:DOwenWilliams or User talk:Jc3s5h. I will look at the web site you provided to see if it is suitable to be cited as the source.

Please take a look at WP:Verifiability which explains the need to provide reliable sources. In this particular case, if a person had the capability of checking the program himself, he probably wouldn't need the program to begin with. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:58, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure how well known the Green Life Innovators site is, so I have asked if it is a suitable source at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard‎#Source for QBasic program. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:14, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I wasn't suggesting that every user should check the program himself. I was suggesting that if an editor, e.g. yourself, has doubts about its reliability, he could check it by running ETIMSDEC, and then decide whether or not the routine should be in Wikipedia.

I have no idea what they'll tell you about Green Life Innovators. But I am quite certain that the code I posted is good.

Delete it if you want. I have plenty of other copies to use myself! Other people won't know what they've missed.

I'm not sure what you mean by referring to "comments about other users". I just replied to the note you sent me, which didn't refer to anyone else. I thought I put my reply on your User talk page, but I may have made a mistake. If so, sorry.

While I have you, let me ask you an unrelated question. Does anyone ever compare articles that are written in different languages? I can read several languages reasonably well, and have sometimes looked at articles in English, and also the corresponding articles in Spanish, French, Italian, and (with some effort) German. Often, they are nowhere near alike. It's like Spanish-speaking people live in a whole different universe...

DOwenWilliams (talk) 22:59, 24 August 2010 (UTC) David Williams[reply]

Computer code to calculate Equation of Time and Solar Declination

The following subroutine, here written in QBasic but easily translatable to other languages, calculates the Equation of Time and the Solar Declination on any day of the year. It is quite accurate. Its Root-Mean-Square error for the Equation of Time is only 3.7 seconds. The Declination is calculated with errors that are always small compared with the angular radius of the sun as seen from the earth (about 0.25 degrees).

I originally posted this on the main pages entitled "Equation of time" and "Declination", here on Wikipedia. However, it was removed by editors because I could not provide a citation to a previous publication, other than to ones I had written myself. I could, and did, refer to a computer program including this routine, which demonstrates its accuracy. But apparently direct observation does not satisfy the rules.

Anyone who wants further information should follow the following link: [Link] The program that includes the routine is ETIMSDEC. There are instructions how to run it. The article titled "The Latitude and Longitude of the Sun", which I wrote several years ago, describes the astronomical logic behind the routine.

DOwenWilliams (talk) 21:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC) David Williams[reply]

FUNCTION ET.Dec (D, F%) STATIC 
  ' Calculates equation of time, in minutes, or solar declination, 
  ' in degrees, on day number D of year. (D = 0 on January 1.) 
  ' F% selects function: True (non-zero) for Equation of Time, 
  ' False (zero) for Declination. 
  ' STATIC means variables are preserved between calls of function 
 
  IF PI = 0 THEN ' first call, initialize constants 
 
    PI = 4 * ATN(1) 
    W = 2 * PI / 365 ' earth's mean orbital angular speed in radians/day 
    DR = 180 / PI ' degree/radian factor 
    C = -23.45 / DR ' reverse angle of earth's axial tilt in radians 
    ST = SIN(C) ' sine of reverse tilt 
    CT = COS(C) ' cosine of reverse tilt 
    E2 = 2 * .0167 ' twice earth's orbital eccentricity 
    SP = 12 * W ' 12 days from December solstice to perihelion 
    D1 = -1 ' holds last D. Saves time if D repeated for both functions 
 
  END IF 
 
  IF D <> D1 THEN ' new value of D 
    A = W * (D + 10) ' Solstice 10 days before Jan 1 
    B = A + E2 * SIN(A - SP) 
    D1 = D 
  END IF 
 
  IF F% THEN ' equation of time calculation 
    C = (A - ATN(TAN(B) / CT)) / PI 
    ET.Dec = 720 * (C - INT(C + .5)) ' this is value of equation of time
    ' in 720 minutes, earth rotates PI radians relative to sun 
 
  ELSE ' declination calculation 
    C = ST * COS(B) 
    ET.Dec = ATN(C / SQR(1 - C * C)) * DR ' this is value of declination
    ' arcsine of C in degrees. ASN not directly available in QBasic 
 
  END IF 
 
END FUNCTION

December 2010

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Before saving your changes to an article, please provide an edit summary, which you forgot to do before saving your recent edit to Marlborough College. Doing so helps everyone understand the intention of your edit (and prevents legitimate edits from being mistaken for vandalism). It is also helpful to users reading the edit history of the page. Thank you. Trafford09 (talk) 18:04, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was a student at Marlborough during the 1950s, while Thomas Garnett was the Master (Headmaster). As I was glancing through the Wikipedia article about the college a few days ago, I noticed that his name had been mis-spelled in a link, with the result that an article about someone named Tommy Garrett was shown in error. So I simply fixed the spelling of the name. It didn't seem like a big enough deal to warrant a long explanation. DOwenWilliams (talk) 19:59, 31 December 2010 (UTC) DOwenWilliams David Williams[reply]

Hi David. Thanks for the reply (it's fine for you to just reply here - I leave people's talk pages on my wp:watchlist, if I've added to them). It was good of you to correct the misspelling, as you did. It's just that we are supposed to supply an edit summary with each edit - even if it's just (in this case) 'sp' which people will assume means spelling correction. And another tool we registered users have at our disposal, of course, is being able to set the 'wp:minor' flag. Both these actions mean that any edit-patrollers don't need to go into our edits to examine them for vandalism. Hope that makes sense.

Anyway, happy continued editing. Regards, Trafford09 (talk) 23:40, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It must be nice to be able to rely on vandals not to write "sp" in the edit summary space or set the "minor" flag!

I just saw the edits you made on my main user page. Sure! I don't mind! Those ones where I had written "prosecutions's" were well worth doing. I must have read the words 100 times without noticing the extra "s". You made an edit on another page a few weeks ago where I had written something like "grass may be be green", and you deleted the extra "be". Again, I had read it many, many times without spotting it. Thanks!

I didn't actually sign those posts on my user page. I copied them there from User talk:Fountains of Bryn Mawr, on which I was having a discussion with him about the value of citations. I signed them there, and didn't bother to delete the signatures when I copied them.

Happy New Year.

DOwenWilliams (talk) 16:16, 2 January 2011 (UTC) David Williams[reply]

Reverting Heliostat Edits

What edit did I make to the heliostat article are you calling erroneous?Ywaz (talk) 16:52, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See some paragraphs I've just written on the talk:Heliostat page. DOwenWilliams (talk) 22:37, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the use of "due to."

The example you cited from the Concise Oxford Dictionary is an example of the correct use of "due to." In the strict grammar that I was taught and taught my writing students "due to" is only properly used in a linking verb construction such as the phrase you provided: "the difficulty is due to our ignorance." "Due to" should not be used to introduce a clause; for example, "Due to the bad weather, I won't be able to work outside."

You are right, however, in that the use of "due to" as a synonym for "because" has become common usage. I always told my writing students that if they couldn't understand the grammar rule for the use of "due to" to avoid it and use "because."

My apologies, by the way, for not providing an authoritative source, as you did for your comment. I moved on to another career decades ago and gave away almost all my stylebooks and grammar guides.49oxen (talk) 02:45, 28 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]