Adrian de Physics

Preparing revamped acoustics article for launch

Hi Adrian, I think that the article is starting to shape up. All we really lack now are some pretty pictures and references (imho). Let's shoot to finish on February 15th. After that, I will publish this on the main site and we can let our fellow wikipedians have at it. What say you? Joe056 (talk) 00:12, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Good to hear from you again Joe. Your suggested time target agreed. That will help to get this moving again. Let me gambit the next step on the draft. There are some things I have in mind; if you think it's been moving in the right direction, I'll put them in hopefully tonight or tomorrow, and see what you think. Would you be able to look for pretty pictures and references ? Adrian Pollock (talk) 00:59, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Article on Lamb Waves - Pre-Release

Hi Coppertwig and thanks for your last. I have put our previous correspondence on the archive page.

About your last round of comments:

I reworded the section on flexure waves, hope it reads better now. What leads to the square root relationship is going to the low frequency limit, not making extra assumptions about the material. The same elastic constants govern there as anywhere else. I suppose you could say it's just a matter of which combination of (the two) elastic constants applies to each frequency of each mode. You probably know that there are only two independent elastic constants in an (isotropic) elastic solid. There are many elastic constants that you can name - shear modulus, Young;s modulus, Poisson's ratio, the Lamé constants, et. etc. but once two are specified, all the others can be calculated.

You ask what is the smallest possible value of the thickness to wavelength ratio? For the zero order modes, there's no limit. Just, for the flexural mode, the thinner it gets, the slower the velocity of propagation (imagine shaking out a sheet).

Your insights about the diagrams are correct. But I need to leave diagrams of the higher order modes, and improved diagrams of the zero order mode, to a future date. Did you look at the referenced movie ? That is really something to look at if you want to get a better sense of the motion!

I've altered the text to make it clearer that the higher modes extend from their nascent frequencies up to infinitely high frequencies.

You were thinking of guided waves as in electromagnetism and wondering how they differed from Lamb waves. It's a valuable analog and your understanding of the difference is exactly right. Another way of saying it would be that the stress and strain tensors have six independent components whereas the electric and magnetic field vectors have only three. I've referenced waveguides (electromagnetic waves) at the bottom rather than discussing it in the text - the article on that subject is a good one. The actual technology of guiding electromagnetic waves is much more advanced than the technology of guiding acoustic waves.

So, after reading your encouragement I went ahead and put it up and also added categories. The only prick in my bubble was when I wanted to show it off to my son and he chose to use "search" instead of "go", and it didn't come up. Links from other articles (e.g. Horace Lamb) don't find it either. Is that just something that takes a bit of time at the server end, or maybe an administrator needs to approve it, or is there something else I need to do ?

Thanks again,
Adrian Pollock (talk) 06:09, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, it's my understanding from what you say above that for both the zero-order extensional and zero-order flexural modes, they extend to arbitrarily low frequencies; however, all other modes have a minimum frequency.

I would like to see the article state what the minimum frequency is for the first-order mode of each type. --Coppertwig (talk) 15:13, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. This will be a nice beef-up for the short section on higher-order modes. There are nice simple formulae for this (it's like resonant harmonics of the thickness) and the same concrete example could be given as before (the 19mm plate at 200kHz). I'll see what I can do (unless anyone else wants to get there first). Adrian Pollock (talk) 03:56, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Congratulations!

You've got your first Wikipedia page up! I think it's definitely an above-average Wikipedian page.

See Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions/archive5#SOME article titles should be plural. Usually names of pages are singular, e.g. "Lamb wave". In this case, I think the plural is better. If you agree, then we can create a redirect from Lamb wave to Lamb waves. (Otherwise, we can move the page again, to Lamb wave.) Once we set up the redirect, then the link from the Horace Lamb article will work, since it actually attempts to link to "Lamb wave", singular, if you look at the wikitext. Alternatively, we can edit Horace Lamb to link to the plural name, but I think we should have the redirect anyway.

I put a comment at Talk:Lamb waves.

I suppose you know how to use the "history" tab. You can see from that that the page has received a few minor edits from Michael Hardy.

I thought the page would show up in the new pages list, but apparently it doesn't. I guess if you create it as a draft and then move it, it only shows up in a list of new user pages when it's first created, and doesn't show up in the newpages list when it's moved. --Coppertwig (talk) 16:21, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I have done the singular-to-plural redirect - was already starting along those lines when I read your suggestion, glad to see that was in line with your suggestion and it's working fine (e.g. works now from Horace Lamb, as you ssid). The article shows up now on "search" and seems to come up much more readily that it did immediately after release.

Actually I used cut-and-paste rather than move, so your remarks about the newpage list may apply to that. It's possible that I went slightly off the recommended track while doing the-cut-and paste, because I did have a momentary confusion.

I'll go now to look at your comment on the talk page and at the edits. I see already that there's been a helpful addition to the "categories" list. Hitherto I've found it a bit difficult to navigate the histories pages, need to get more fluent at that.

Thanks again Coppertwig,

Adrian Pollock (talk) 17:57, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Update FYI - Have responded to your comments, done minor cleanups. Your edits and Michael Hardy's appreciated (I got better at navigating the history pages). I added the tidbit that the phrase "lamb waves" was coined by Floyd Firestone, one of the "fathers" of ultrasonic testing. That tidbit is from one of Worlton's papers, hopefully it doesn't need to be explicitly referenced. Do you think it would be good to write a stub "Plate waves" (Lamb waves being a subset of this topic)? I see that there's ongoing debate about the merits of stubs. I'm also contemplating whether to do something about "Physical acoustics" which is listed as a field within "Acoustics" but has no article as yet.
Adrian Pollock (talk) 20:41, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry I criticized your diagram. You were right. I was thinking of waves like electromagnetic guided waves.

I hope I haven't been too critical of your article. I'm trying to mostly help you rather than disputing with you.

You're not supposed to do cut-and-paste moves. But as far as I can tell, you didn't. Cut-and-paste moves separate the contents from the article history, which is a bad thing and can lead to problems involving copyright and the GFDL license. But currently the Lamb waves article seems to have its whole edit history, right back to when I created an empty draft page for you, so that's fine.

On talk pages, it's customary when replying to someone's comment to begin each paragraph of your comment with a colon, or more precisely with one more colon than the person you're replying to used. The colons cause indenting. Thus, your reply is indented one level more than what you're replying to. This helps make a visual distinction between what different people said. Note that sometimes one is replying to a message other than the one immediately above; the number of colons relates to the message you're replying to, not necessarily the message immediately preceding, though it usually is. I took the liberty of modifying your comments at Talk:Lamb waves to conform to this convention. Also, I think usually people don't begin a new line or paragraph for their signature. I suppose you can if you want, but putting your signature on a separate line could lead to it sometimes being separated from your comment, as occasionally people insert comments between paragraphs of other peoples' comments (though it may not be good to do so too often).

I'll probably have more comments later (more subject-oriented). --Coppertwig (talk) 13:20, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Re showing it to your son with "search": I think it can take a few days for new articles to be indexed in the Wikipedia search engine. (You can alternatively use Google to search for Wikipedia articles; again though it may take days to be indexed.) The articles themselves usually show up immediately, though occasionally a new page or the latest edit(s) to an existing page don't display for a minute or so and you are still shown the old version of the page, or a message telling you there's no such page in the case of new pages. --Coppertwig (talk) 14:24, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Re recent edits to your userpage: It also helps to use the "preview" button a lot -- although not too much, if you're worried about suddenly losing your Internet connection and losing your edits. At Lamb waves I've tried to format some equations using a table. There may be a better way to do it. --Coppertwig (talk) 03:36, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Hmm yes, I have been put off using the "preview" button after frequently coming back into the edit mode after using it and finding that my edits were no longer there. Maybe I have been coming back the wrong way. Last time it happened I figured it was because I used the back-arrow on my browser. Maybe I should just be hitting "edit this page" again. So I have started playing with the sandbox thing.

Thanks for the math. I have had a real typographic dilemma over the use of individual symbols in the ordinary text line, and then finding them look so different in the equation. Spent a lot of nitpick time trying to get consistency through the article as far as I could see how. Like the italic thing. Apart from that, I'm learning somewhat slowly and painfully about the use of the math tags, do you recommend I just follow your examples (which works pretty well) or is there a really good style guide somewhere ?Adrian Pollock (talk) 03:48, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Another coincidence, I just happen to be doing my first foray into tables in User:Adrian de Physics/sandbox for the article on acoustics.Adrian Pollock (talk) 03:54, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Re math tags: See Help:Displaying a formula. If you need any more detail, a book or web page about LaTeX might be helpful; I believe what's used inside the math tags is LaTeX, which is similar to TeX but not quite the same, but I can't guarantee anything about that. Re using math symbols within a sentence: see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics)#Typesetting of mathematical formulas. I confess I don't understand what they mean by "LaTeX rendered as HTML", but the general gist that I seem to get is that displayed formulas should be done with math tags, while small formulas within sentences should be done with HTML, e.g. e^x for e^x.

Re getting symbols to look similar using HTML: I suppose if you have to you can (in a few cases) use math tags in inline formulas too, and then they should look OK (though that's recommended against on the manual-of-style page I just mentioned.) You can use italics (two apostrophes), bold (three apostrophes), both bold and italic (five apostrophes) to try to duplicate some symbols. There may be other symbols and tricks you can use. Hmm, when I'm editing there's this box of symbols at the bottom of the page that I usually ignore, but you can click on symbols there and get Greek letters and other things: αβγ etc. It's also possible to go to Wikipedias of other languages, click edit, and they have other symbols available; you can click on them and then copy-and-paste them here. (I'm pretty sure I've copied symbols from one Wikimedia project to another like that, e.g. to get French accents or something.) Maybe there's someplace you can get math symbols and copy-and-paste them in. I don't know how those symbols work. I think maybe they're "unicode", whatever that is.

Re the preview button: I've had trouble with it too, but it was my own fault, and I've learned to do better with it. The trick is: every time you click "preview", you need to get it very firmly in your mind that you've clicked "preview" and that you still need to click "save page" before going away and doing something else. The prime mistakes I've made are: clicking "preview", then clicking "edit this page" at the top of the page again; and clicking "preview", then clicking on some link somewhere on the page, navigating away, and either forgetting to come back or else using some combination of navigating that makes it impossible to get back even by using the back button repeatedly. (I now hereby save this edit before walking out of the room to go and make ginger tea, for example.)

When using the preview button, I'll often check links in my post to see if they go to the right place, by clicking on them, and then clicking "back". This works well if I remember to click "back" and "save page".

I posted a comment at Talk:Lamb waves. I forget if I mentioned watchlists to you -- maybe you figured that out yourself. Click "watch" at the top of pages you're interested in, and then you can at any time click "my watchlist" at the very top right of the page, near your name, and see whether there are any recent edits on any of those pages. If you "watch" an article page, you automatically also see changes to its talk page. See Wikipedia:Watchlist. I'm currently "watching" this user talk page.

You're a fast learner, uploading images and archiving your talk page etc. already. I'm impressed by your User:Adrian de Physics/sandbox -- an ambitious plan to organize many articles. Looks great. --Coppertwig (talk) 01:16, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your ongoing help ! ! You have a happy knack of coming up with just the right things at the right times. I will renew my efforts to use the preview feature. Yes, the Talk:acoustics project is turning out to be quite a challenge. There were a lot of leftover appeals for improvement but no-one had worked on it for a while and it doesn't do justice to the subject. It's the first time I've had a real wrestle with taxonomy. What a hole we dig for ourselves when we try to linearize the non-linear and project the n-dimensional nexus (or is it plexus?) onto a plane ! If the challenge of getting this done in best Wikipedia style has any attraction to you, welcome to the party . . . I do know you have all kinds of things going on but it's just me and Joe056 right now. Sooner or later we'll have to get bold and come out of the closet. Not in a big rush but want to keep it moving along.Adrian Pollock (talk) 05:59, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Adrian. I hope you don't mind that I edited your sandbox to make the link for Acoustical measurements and instrumentation to to that page. I notice you have the "al" in parentheses. Does this mean you think the page should be renamed to "Acoustic measurements and instrumentation"? You can rename it yourself; it's pretty easy, just click "move" at the top of the page. Optionally you can first suggest a move on the talk page, if you think people might object; or if not many people seem to be paying much attention to these articles or you're pretty sure they won't mind, maybe just go ahead and move it. Alternatively, you can create a redirect page at Acoustic measurements and instrumentation.

Re preview button: you could keep in mind a certain maximum length of time or amount of editing that you do before clicking "save page". As you develop the habit of using the preview button and gain confidence with it you can gradually increase that amount of time, but never to huge amounts, since there's always a risk of losing your edits one way or another. Anyway, that's more-or-less what I do. (Except I didn't this time, and forgot to sign my first paragraph!) --Coppertwig (talk) 17:29, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Not an authority on "acoustic" vs "acoustical". Somebody must have addressed this somewhere and it would be helpful to know about but meanwhile I just have a dim idea, may or may not work, that "acoustic" goes with things in the material world as in acoustic emission, acoustic transducer while "acoustical" goes with the arts and sciences as in acoustical theory, acoustical experiment, acoustical engineering. If that works for >=80% of what's out there, let's go for it. I believe my parentheses indicated uncertainty.Adrian Pollock (talk) 16:39, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Google gets us at last ! First time I saw this article come up on a Google search for "Lamb waves" and it is at #25 (out of 216,000, not that that means a whole lot). Let the competition begin ! Adrian Pollock (talk) 01:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Congratulations! I hope it will move up. There's also a link on the first page of Google hits to the Wikipedia page on Horace Lamb, which links to Lamb waves. You can probably help Lamb waves move up in Google if you get friends at various universities to put links to it from university websites. I think Google would rate a link from the physics or acoustics department of a university (or other relevant institution) as indicating considerable relevance.

Puzzling question

Coppertwig, I am puzzled by something. On Google searches for "Lamb Wave" we are doing great, happy to see that our article is up from #25 to #13 (I tried to make the first couple of lines more inviting, perhaps that is helping). But a Google search for "Lamb Waves" (plural) doesn't find our article at all, at least not in the first 50 or 60 references, unless one adds other words to help it. Do you think this is anything to do with the singular/plural redirect thing that we did way back (see discussion above)? If you understand why this is happening, can you think of a technique that could help get us well found by searches either singular or plural ? I know this is not the most important thing but . . .Adrian Pollock (talk) 22:29, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

BTW I just found an excellent, downloadable Ph.D. thesis on Lamb waves for NDT, that I plan to add to either the references or the "See also" section. Adrian Pollock (talk) 22:29, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, at least it's going up on Google! Let's hope it has momentum! The idea is that hopefully some people will find it in Google searches and put links to it from relevant websites, which will in turn boost the Google rating.

Are you sure you were searching for Lamb waves plural earlier on when it was at @25? If so, maybe it's gone down on Google.

I don't think that the redirect from Lamb wave can do any harm to the Google rating. Maybe what's happening is that most articles on the Internet use the plural, and that redirect is one of the few that uses the singular, and Google therefore rates the Lamb waves article higher on searches for "Lamb wave" singular, than it would if the redirect weren't there.

On a yahoo search, the Wikipedia Horace Lamb and Lamb waves articles are numbers 1 and 3, and numbers 3 and 4, respectively in searches for "Lamb waves" and "Lamb wave" respectively.

Here's a nifty website -- do we already have a link to this one or one like it? With a moving animated Lamb wave: [1]

There might be ways of improving the Google rating by doing things like having the lead section contain lots of the sorts of words that appear in other web pages about Lamb waves; possibly words like "longitudinal", "compression", "generate", "rarefaction", "ultrasonic" etc. (I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not.) It's possible that the lead section is now too short. According to the Manual of Style it can be up to four paragraphs. I'm just guessing, but if I were Google I would use the lead section of Wikipedia articles to find the keywords (as opposed to, say, the first four paragraphs regardless of section headings).

OK, here's something a little closer to factual: [2] guesses of experts re how google establishes its ratings. --Coppertwig (talk) 02:21, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I hereby offer to adopt you, Adrian, under Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user. It's just a matter of putting the adoption templates on our userpages, since I've already been helping you. If you'd prefer to just continue as we have been without the templates, that's fine too.

Thank you and I am happy to accept ! It's clear that without your help I would be way behind of where I am now, both in things done and in things planned. Also, that there is plenty more where that came from ! So again, thanks and I will change the template and let's move forward. Do you have other adoptees lurking in your past or present ? What shall I call you, paterfamilias ? :) Adrian Pollock (talk) 05:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay replying. I have some other things going on that will slow me down these couple of weeks but am not disappearing. Adrian Pollock (talk) 05:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I might help out with some of the other acoustics articles. If it's OK with you I might just follow you around and edit the same articles, similarly to what I've been doing with Lamb waves. If you'd rather work on some things without my interference :-) let me know and I'll back off, though I might (or might not) still edit those articles later on (or immediately if I feel strongly about something).

I see there's some recent discussion at Talk:Linear elasticity#Merge about the relative arrangement of articles. --Coppertwig (talk) 14:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I had noticed some of this earlier and it is indeed part of the context of the acoustics article. Your noticing it too prompted me to add a comment to their discussion. I think there are some good people working on that and hope they will settle on a sensible arrangement without any loss of value, that the acoustics article(s) can reference into. Meanwhile there is plenty to do still on the acoustics and Lamb waves articles.Adrian Pollock (talk) 05:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Congratulations. I've updated your adoption template. If you look on my userpage, among my userboxes you'll see I have two adoptees, yourself and User:Acps110. Um, just call me Coppertwig, I guess.  :-) --Coppertwig (talk) 21:57, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I improved the first paragraphs and put the characteristic equations on the Lamb wave article (thanks for those), also a placeholder version of the forms of the postulated sinusoidal waves (eigenfumctions) which I know you were wanting to see. I will have to dig for the complete sinusoidal forms since I do not have the z part of them in my head, the displacements depend on z as well as on (kx-ωt) of course. Won't be able to do this until next week. Meanwhile I think it holds water and will appreciate your comments on how it looks to you after the restructuring. I think the lack of graphic material is the weakest point now. Adrian Pollock (talk) 08:32, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

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