User talk:Eric Corbett/Archives/2013/February

FYI

Wikipedia:WMF noticeboard just started. And Wikipedia_talk:MED#JMIR_Wiki_Medical_Reviews is a proposal that you might find interesting. Best! Biosthmors (talk) 04:54, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Green children of Woolpit

On the Main page: Precious again, a great collaboration of three people who all received my PumpkinSky Prize already, a first! - singing green child --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:39, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

More green-children stuff

The appearance of the article on the main page put me in mind of a long-ago thread on your talk page in which I referred to Randolph Stow's 1980 novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. I think a mention of the novel would be appropriate in the "Legacy" section of the article, but I'm too eremitical myself to have easy access to sourcing. I wonder if you are able to view this article by way of a library system or otherwise and if it would support a one-or-two sentence addition to the article, to the effect that Stow's protagonist writes a version of the legend populated by the people of his everyday life and that Stow includes in an appendix (his own) translations of both Ralph of Coggeshall's and William of Newburgh's accounts. Deor (talk) 23:29, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

• Hey Deor, I can't speak for Malleus, but I'll have a look. EBSCO is dead right now, apparently, but I'll try again tomorrow. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 00:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. When I posted the message above, I hadn't noticed that Malleus was retired. I should have posted at WP:RX. Deor (talk) 01:20, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

He pops in and out, I think. Drmies (talk) 02:15, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

You mean like a quantum particle? Or is it a case of he's everywhere and nowhere baby, that's where he's at :) Richerman (talk) 06:42, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I see you, Malleus, speaking when you feel like it, - we should do the same ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:34, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Deor, I got the article; Malleus, I'm on it: it looks promising. I also picked up a book by Nancy Partner on twelfth-century issues which discusses our children. Later, Drmies (talk) 21:24, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Good to hear, Drmies. I didn't want to add anything to the article just on my say-so as someone who's read the novel. Deor (talk) 23:37, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Look at my additions. Is the novel any good? Our library had nothing but some play, or collection of short plays. Drmies (talk) 00:04, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

You seem to have messed up the sentence beginning "Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes ..." somehow, citing the first part of the sentence to Duckworth and leaving the second part as an uncited separate sentence beginning with a lowercase letter. And in Stow's novel, the children don't actually "appear to the main character, Crispin Clare"; rather, Clare occupies himself—after something like a nervous breakdown—by writing versions of medieval legends in which the green children and other figures become identified with the figures he interacts with in his daily life. I obviously haven't read the Duckworth piece, nor have I read the Cohen one, so I'm not sure what they actually say. (I like the novel, but in some ways I like Stow's last novel, The Suburbs of Hell, even more.) Deor (talk) 00:28, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

It's one sentence with a colon in the middle. The first part is indeed cited to Duckworth, for two reasons: it shows that Cohen is being cited (and this adds to the notability of his work--it's important for tenure, etc.), and it allows me to quote Duckworth who summarizes part of Cohen's argument in layman's terms. I may order the novel. Incidentally, I spent two hours reading half of Partner's book and got a sentence and a half out of it on-wiki: that's not a bad balance, I suppose. Malleus, I am having a hard time with the "r" template and I hope I did it right. If you ever pop in, obeying the laws of quantum physics or not, maybe you can have a look. Drmies (talk) 05:40, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, my aged eyes misread the colon as a period. Time for new glasses. Deor (talk) 11:07, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

You seem to be getting the hang of the {{r}} template Drmies. Malleus Fatuorum 14:30, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Close, but no cigar. I saw that R thing in another ref and figured it was for articles, so I just copied it (I don't know what it does, or how). I saw "citation" in another one and changed the book (and I think someone else mentioned this to me last week or so), but forgot to do the journal reference. Thanks also for correcting my typo; I'm a bit under the weather and I'm slipping up all over the place. Feel free also to tweak my sentences: I think I write longer sentences than the average editor here, it's a professional deformation. BTW, I'm finishing up a werewolf paper, which looks at Gerald of Wales also. The twelfth century was a really interesting period, with lots of talk of transformation. Drmies (talk) 15:08, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Malleus, do you remember that "readability index" meter we tossed around some time ago? I'll look in my TP archives. I doubt I have improved. Drmies (talk) 19:30, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

I do, yes; it's now here. Looking just at the Legacy section, that has a Flesch-Kincaid readability index of 49.1, which seems a bit marginal to me. I'd prefer to see it above 50, but on the other hand the SMOG index is 10.1, which is probably about right for an encyclopedia article.

As an exercise, I tried some rewriting to see how high I could get the Flesch-Kincaid score before the text started to look like it was written for pre-school children. Whether it's a literary improvement or not I'll leave for others to judge:

"The English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read describes the story of the green children in his English Prose Style (1931), as "the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform". It was the inspiration for his only novel, The Green Child, written in 1934. A 1994 adaptation by Kevin Crossley-Holland tells the story from the green girl's point of view."

"Author John Macklin published an account of two green children who arrived in the Spanish village of Banjos in 1887. Many of the details in his 1965 book, Strange Destinies, mirror the accounts given of the Woolpit children, such as the name of the mayor, Ricardo de Calno. As there is no record of any vilage in Spain called Banjos it seems that Macklin's story is an invention."

"The green girl is the inspiration for the titular character in Australian novelist and poet Randolph Stow's 1980 novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. The main character, Crispin Clare, becomes interested in several of those mentioned in the Latin accounts of William of Newburgh, Gervase of Tilbury, and others. Stow includes translations from those texts, and his characters "have histories of loss and dispossession that echo [Clare's] own". The green children are the subject of a 1990 community opera performed by children and adults, composed by Nicola LeFanu with a libretto by Kevin Crossley-Holland. In 2002 English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote a verse play based on the story of the green children, Wolfpit (the earlier name for Woolpit), which was performed once in New York City. In Maxwell's version the girl becomes an indentured servant to the lord of the manor, until a stranger named Juxon buys her freedom and takes her away."

This version has a Flesch-Kincaid readability index of 56.6 and a SMOG index of 9.1, which seems about right to me score-wise if our target audience is an intelligent 14 year old. It's curious that Wikipedia doesn't seem to make much use of these accessibility tools, but my own view is that ideally we'd be aiming for a Flesch-Kincaid score of 50+ and a SMOG score of 9–10. So your version isn't really so far away. Malleus Fatuorum 23:25, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

That's not bad prose at all, Malleus. I tried a few chunks of text from the article I'm working on and I noticed that those different grade-level scores have great variation (between 12.7 and 21.8 for my final paragraph, where I let it all hang out rhetorically--Flesch-Kincaid was 27.8). Is our target audience an intelligent 14-year old? That seems reasonable enough. But do articles on math and science compute the same way? You know, I should stop screwing around here with ANI threads and petty vandalism and finish that. Oh, if you see my edits on Babbling from this morning you'll see that I spent a pleasant day reading articles on language acquisition and such. I can't wait til little Liam, the Mayor of the House, really starts babbling. My regards to Mrs. Malleus, Drmies (talk) 03:37, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Here's a little something for ya

Rhinotomy. This should be big and good, but I can't do it alone. Talk page stalkers, any takers? Drmies (talk) 17:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

• I've been trying to look for images. The Sperati article cited has a couple of them but I can't ascertain their status. I looked on Google and now I'm sick to my stomach. Drmies (talk) 01:53, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Two examples in Herodotus' History (related in Kapucinski's Travels with Herodotus); self mutilation of the nose and ears in order to deceive the leaders of a besieged city, the practice of removing the noses and ears of skilled craftsmen in order to prevent them absconding. There might be something about Russians in Siberia (frostbite, replacement of the missing tip of the nose with a prothesis). Richard III's nose has now been replicated thanks to new discoveries over the last few years in the relationship between the bone structure of the skull and the nasal cartilage (report on BBC Radio 4). I bet there's a link between Nose tombs and the Cobra effect. Ning-ning (talk) 08:08, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Guess I need to reread Kapucinski! (Hadn't yet because I wasn't so impressed with it the first time.) Your Cobra effect led me to that article about King Leopold and hands. What disgusting animals we humans are. Drmies (talk) 23:38, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry

Malleus...I meant to hit "diff" but hit "rollback" by mistake when I was checking the edit you had made to your userpage...by the time I went to self revert Crisco beat me to it...I have to be more careful when I'm using my portable device. Sorry about that.--MONGO 12:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

No worries MONGO, we all make mistakes. Malleus Fatuorum 04:09, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

My inadvertent use of the revert is minor compared to my defense of MathewTownsend. I used to spot socks pretty quickly, but I had my radar off on that one. I apologize for making bad assumptions of you in that matter.--MONGO 12:47, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Apology accepted MONGO. In fact it was quite late in the day before I realised myself who MathewTownsend really was. As for making bad assumptions of me, that just about sums up my Wikipedia adventure; I pretty much became used to it towards the end. Malleus Fatuorum 14:27, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

(watching) look at my talk for a most general comment ;) (sing praises II) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:41, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

British comics

Not exactly a TV series from the 50s, but it's the closest I could find: Monster Fun. Drmies (talk) 02:40, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

What the Hell is a plate wobbler? Malleus Fatuorum 04:13, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

It's a "Monster Mirth Maker", of course. — sparklism ^hey! 08:33, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

A Plate wobbler is crazy notable since Graham Kibble-White wrote about it, who's also crazy notable! Plus, Damien Hirst used the term in simile. Drmies (talk) 15:38, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Plate wobbler

The two of you should look at the topic I opened at WP:AN. If nothing else, it will give you an opportunity to tell me I'm full of crap, always a worthwhile sport.--Bbb23 (talk) 23:41, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I think Plate wobbler is much more exciting and closer to FA status than Hose coupling.Drmies (talk) 03:48, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I thought Hose coupling was going to be a sex term article since you are the one that linked it. Needless to say, I was disappointed when going there. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © Join WER 14:59, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

A plate wobbler is a device for humorously wobbling a plate, a plate wobbler (à la Hirst) is one who wobbles plates and a wobble plate nutates (Majumdar (2000) Oil Hydraulic Systems pp. 118–119) --Senra (talk) 19:45, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I read "an inflatable rubber bladder and a hand-operated pump" and thought it was talking about a sex toy. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

This might interest you

[1] –Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 12:39, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Main page appearance: Kennet and Avon Canal

This is a note to let the main editors of Kennet and Avon Canal know that the article will be appearing as today's featured article on March 12, 2013. You can view the TFA blurb at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 12, 2013. If you prefer that the article appear as TFA on a different date, or not at all, please ask featured article director Raul654 (talk · contribs) or his delegates Dabomb87 (talk · contribs), Gimmetoo (talk · contribs), and Bencherlite (talk · contribs), or start a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests. If the previous blurb needs tweaking, you can change it—following the instructions at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/instructions. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page. The blurb as it stands now is below:

The Kennet and Avon Canal is a waterway in southern England with an overall length of 87 miles (140 km), made up of two lengths of navigable river linked by a canal. The name is commonly used to refer to the entire length of the navigation rather than solely to the central canal section. From Bristol to Bath the waterway follows the natural course of the River Avon before the canal links it to the River Kennet at Newbury, and from there to Reading on the River Thames. In all, the waterway incorporates more than 100 locks (Caen Hill Locks pictured). The two river stretches were made navigable in the early 18th century, and the 57-mile (92 km) canal section was constructed between 1794 and 1810. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the canal gradually fell into disuse after the opening of the Great Western Railway. In the latter half of the 20th century the canal was restored in stages, largely by volunteers. After decades of dereliction and much restoration work, it was fully reopened in 1990. The Kennet and Avon Canal has been developed as a popular heritage tourism destination for boating, canoeing, fishing, walking, and cycling, and is also important for wildlife conservation. (Full article...)

UcuchaBot (talk) 23:01, 19 February 2013 (UTC)