Mr.98

Your input is needed on the SOPA initiative

Hi Mr.98,

You are receiving this message either because you expressed an opinion about the proposed SOPA blackout before full blackout and soft blackout were adequately differentiated, or because you expressed general support without specifying a preference. Please ensure that your voice is heard by clarifying your position accordingly.

Thank you.

Message delivered as per request on ANI. -- The Helpful Bot 16:38, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Note

Good removal.[1] :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:25, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Mercator latitude scaling

How is your Ground Overlay working? -- ToE 00:31, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I haven't had time to play with it lately, but I'll get back to it soon... --Mr.98 (talk) 01:30, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

That's cool. It has archived and rolled off WP:RD/MA, but I'll keep a watch here. I'm quite curious to know if it is just a case of degrees vs. radians for the cos(x) function, or if there is more going on. -- ToE 08:03, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Google ads/Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

It didn't find nothing.--188.4.233.216 (talk) 16:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Deleted post

There is a discussion which concerns you at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Deleted Birther soapboxing. SpinningSpark 19:40, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Ancient Gallup polls

"The is a source limitation for talking about the opinions of those other than scholars — they weren't carving Gallup polls into tablets."

This is the funniest thing I've read on the reference desk in a long time :-) Nyttend (talk) 00:16, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Regarding wireless bandwidth limiting

Dear Mr. 98:

Thank you for your reply to my original post on June 1. I had been very busy over the past couple of days taking my godparents sightseeing around Canada and the States, so I have neglected to check back on this issue.

To make the long story short, my ISP is Bell Canada (known simply as "Bell" in Canada), Toronto to be specific. I have recently changed my plan to Bell's Fibe 15/10 because the discount on my old plan is set to expire at the end of May. As a result of the change Bell sent a technician to my home to do a bunch of new wiring, in the process the technician also took away my old 2wire DSL modem, which had the capability of limiting the speed of incoming wireless connections down to 1 mbps, and replaced it with a new, big, black DSL modem which did not have such an option in its 192.168.2.1 settings page.

I also would like to correct an error in my original post: I talked to another Bell technician who corrected my saying "bandwidth limiting" -- the technician said that no modem/router is capable of limiting bandwidth, which is the total amount of data that my tenants use over a given period of time, and that when I say "bandwidth limiting", I really mean "connection speed limiting", so I would just like to make that correction here.

Thanks for all your help,

L33th4x0r (talk) 19:31, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

It sounds to me like you'll need either an additional router to go in between the modem and the users, or you'll need to install open firmware on the router that supports Quality of Service limiting. (Note that if you don't own the modem/router, that might not be a good idea.) This blog post links to a number of the relevant topics and explains them well. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:01, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

You are invited

Hello, Mr.98, just wanted to invite you to participate in a userspace extension of a recent RefDesk discussion you took part in, created for the purposes of illumination, community goodwill, and, just perhaps, improved articles on the subject matter. This invitation goes out specifically to you as a participant in the original discussion, but anyone reading this is free to join us. Come contribute if you are so-inclined and don't have too much real editing to do! :) Snow (talk) 11:38, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I'll answer questions about what I previously wrote, but I'm not really interested in debating for the heck of it, and if I wanted to improve articles, I would just do that. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:00, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome to participate to whatever extent you like. I'm just trying something different, experimenting within creating a space where conversations that have grown out of context for the location where they began can be continued if further discussion might be of use to editors. But, being mindful that even userspace should be primarily used for the improvement of the encyclopedia, I'm hoping to implement productive edits as a result of discussion. Unfortunately, it seems I should have done this days ago when the conversation was still hot, or waited for a better candidate discussion, since having only three people involved isn't likely to flesh out if it's a fruitful approach or just a bad use of editing time. Still, appreciate your participation. Snow (talk) 05:54, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

She's dead, Jim

What sort of good faith does it require to assume that zookeepers haven't noticed their gorilla died four years ago? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Miscellaneous&diff=506276151&oldid=506271477. μηδείς (talk) 20:18, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Being wrong, or confused, or misinformed, or committing a grammatical error, or whatever, is not sufficient evidence of trolling in and of itself. Letting such a question stand was not going to do any harm. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:23, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Your question on the math reference desk

The folks at the reference desk seem to be trying to get you to show some sort of effort to solve the problem yourself given some pointers. It is difficult to gauge how much of a leap this is for you. I'll give you some formulae that should be straightforward to translate into code:

Some variables:

r is the radius of the earth (set this to 1 earth-radius unit)

θ is latitude

φ is longitude

In Rodrigues' formula,

k is the vector representing your point 1, about which rotation occurs

v is the vector representing your point 2, before rotation about point 1

v_rot is the vector representing your point 3, after rotation.

For each of the first two vectors k and v, you must calculate their components (Cartesian coordinates in 3-space with the origin at the centre of the Earth):

x = r cosθ cosφ

y = r sinθ cosφ

z = r sinφ.

Using Rodrigues' rotation formula (for now I will assume that you can translate that into component-wise code), determine the third vector v_rot. Then reverse the conversion using the formulae:

r² = x² + y² + z² (should be [almost exactly] 1, and can be ignored)

θ = asin(z/r)

φ = atan2(y/r,x/r).

I have not checked this, but it should be close to correct. Indicate whether you get stuck with this. — Quondum^☏ 03:09, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I will play with this a bit. I've tried to emphasize that this is a big leap for me — that I don't really follow formal mathematical notation to well, though I can follow it in code just fine. I'll see where I get with this. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:21, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

VBA macros

Thank you once again. My email address is: my-username-at-wikipedia + "." + "wikipedia@gmail.com". bamse (talk) 21:55, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks — I'll send it tomorrow morning. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:13, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Or tomorrow late afternoon, as it was. (I guess it is morning somewhere.) Anyway, it has been sent. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:46, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For helping out in answering many of my questions at the Reference Desk. You deserve this barnstar. :) Futurist110 (talk) 20:32, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Dual Licensing

Hi, I wanted to let you know I removed the question and your answer about dual licensing. It's a rather blatant solicitation of what is indeed legal advice. Your answer is obviously in good faith, but he needs to hear it from an intellectual property rights lawyer. I am letting you know I did this here so it doesn't look like I'm trying to act unnoticed, you can see the discussion on the talk page. μηδείς (talk) 16:51, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Giving OPs chances

"Let's give them a chance" - do you mean let's give them a chance for us to do their homework for them? Because that is exactly what we're being asked to do. The joke I referred to was that they would just parrot their homework or test question word for word, and expect us to just spew out the answers. I appreciate their English skills may be lower than yours and mine, and I was certainly not having a go at them for that. But if their English is so poor that they couldn't even say in their own words what they wanted to find out, they have no business doing the course, and the school or university should be deregistered for accepting paying students who obviously would not understand most of the lectures. No, that's too extreme a possibility; I assume their English is at least passable. The only remaining possibility is they're abusing our service here and trying to make fools of us. Or, to be charitable, to see how much they can get away with, the preoccupation of the student throughout the ages. Hence my retort.

Apart from any of this, please do not arbitrarily remove other editors' posts, particularly editors of high standing and impeccable reputation. Hat them if you absolutely must, but please consider an alternative explanation before doing even that. We rarely remove requests for legal or medical advice, even though we warn OPs we will do just that. Removing stuff is for truly infamous cases. I suppose I should be flattered if you feel I have finally risen to the heights of infamy. Till now I was content with mere fame, but then, my mother always said I was an underachiever. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 20:13, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Mr.98. You have new messages at JackofOz's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

our inability detect aliens

Thank you for reviewing my hypothesis. The example in your first reason seems rather to support my position. In our planet we have an finite number of animals and lifeforms. While we are not seen yet some, there are many that we have seen and there are others that we have seen using tools, such as microbes in microscope. I'll continue reading your post. Ryanspir (talk) 17:17, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

It does not support your position. Just because we have not detected things does not mean they aren't there. The fact that even on our tiny (in universal terms) hunk of rock there is a lot of life we have yet to detect is a good indication that any sweeping generalizations about the abundance of life in the universe are quite off base. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:54, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

inability of aliens to reach us

Well, lets assume that speed of light barrier cannot be broken, to make it seemingly harder for me to argue this point. However, an infinite number of lifeforms traveling and migrating during infinite time will surely reach us, or to the space near us, simply because they have had an infinite time to perform this travel. Having infinite time to reach us, even if they would travel with the speed of sound, the issue of speed makes no difference.

You keep using the word "infinite" but there is, as of yet, no reason to presume that the universe, its age, or its contents are really "infinite." The numbers are large but not at all infinite. There are a finite number of atoms in the universe. This means there are finite possibilities and any reasoning based on the idea that there are infinites is completely false. There is a big difference between "unfathomly large for a human being" and "infinite" in physical, biological, and philosophical terms. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:52, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

See, for example, Olbers' paradox. There is a big practical difference between finite and infinite time, space, etc. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:31, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Drake and our ability to detect life

Drake is mainly talking about picking up signals from civilizations that are far a way. But considering that there are infinite number of alien lifeforms, some very big number of them would be around us. While we might not be able to detect some of them or many of them, because of involved differences, its obvious that we would see and detect some of them for they are infinite in number. Ryanspir (talk) 18:20, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

If you aren't going to read any of my responses, I'm not going to bother responding. There are not an infinite number of alien lifeforms. There are not even an infinite number of atoms in the universe. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:32, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Universe (Meta)

By our world i meant meta universe, not just our universe. Please see ultimate coincidence section in the existence of God talkpage. I'm not aware of any scientific theories of how old the meta universe is or its space limits. Can you please point me to some? But simple logic tells us for example that its infinite in space and it cannot be otherwise. A simple question: what would be beyond the borders of the meta universe - shows that. Ryanspir (talk) 18:29, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

We do not have any true scientific theories of a "meta universe." Much less the idea of whether different universes in a multiverse could in any way connect to one another. This is not logic, this is philosophical nonsense. See above. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:33, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

multiverse

Yes, its called multiverse as well. So please reconsider my reasoning of infinite in time and space. Regarding being connected, i already elucidated it. Even if the universes are extremely far from each other, having infinite time negates both speed requirements and distance limitations. Please continue to criticize, as it helps me to refine the hypothesis. Ryanspir (talk) 19:38, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

It does not follow, even if there were infinite universes (which we have no real idea if it is true or not) that they are connected to each other. If they are not connected, then having infinite time and space does not make a difference. Furthermore, for each individual multiverse, there would be finite amounts of time and space. But at this point you have branched well off into completely speculative territory. Your axioms are not warranted; no conclusions thus follow. It is not an argument for anything. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:40, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

To put this another way, once you have admitted so many flimsy axioms into the equation, many equally likely possibilities other than God pop out. You might as well conjure that such aliens just don't like us, or are allergic to us. You might as well conjure that there is a secret multiverse police force that keeps aliens away. And so on and so on. All are equally baseless speculation because your axioms are baseless speculation. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:43, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

continuum

I think we might be confused with definitions. Lets not use multiverse for now, lets use definition - time-space continuum that is encompassing everything there is. However, i would like to point briefly your attention that even our universe might be eternal in time, consider asking: how long time it was as a singular point before big bang, and more importantly, what was before that.

In this time-space continuum, do you accept the fact that simple logic tells us that its infinite in space due to absolute improbability of any 'end' or border to space due to the fact that what would lie beyond the 'end/border'? Please tell me what do you think about it. I would highly appreciate your opinion about this specific core-point of the hypothesis.

There are many cosmological models, but you seem confused about this. It is not necessary to get into the details of the current cosmology except to say that it is, in every sense, finite. The complexities of possible "edges" and presence or lacks thereof (it depends on the geometry) are actually quite irrelevant to your point. Your argument rests entirely on the idea of the relevant universe being infinite in time and space; it is finite in both. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:41, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

You are saying as if you have a prove it's finite. :). BTW, I like your point about multiverse police. In anyway, what I'm proposing is a hypothesis. I'm though confused why do you think meta-universe is finite. About edges, I wonder why you consider edges irrelevant. Thank you. Ryanspir (talk) 14:25, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Every bit of evidence we have at the moment is that the universe that we can interact with is finite in both space and time. There is as of yet nothing to suggest the contrary. That's the part that makes the argument completely fall apart; whether there are non-interactionary universes (as most multiverse theories propose) is completely irrelevant. None of the multiverse cosmological models I have ever seen suggest that you can travel from one universe to another by just floating into the edges; it is a completely unwarranted assumption.

Look — no offense, but your argument is a bad one. I've tried to explain the flaws in it. It's time to go back to the drawing board with it. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:27, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

1. Our universe after Big Bang. It has started from the moment of the explosion, thus not eternal. It may expand forever thus becoming eternal and infinite in space; it may remain forever in some equilibrium thus be infinite in time and finite in space; it may collapse back to a singular point, thus be finite in both time and space.

2.The very same our universe, but we are not stopping to look back at Big Bang as the point of creation. We pass this point and look beyond. What was before the singular point? There could have been another Big Bang prior to our Big Bang, after which the universe has collapsed to a singular point from which our Bing Bang originated. Or there could have been any other events that lead to the creating of singular point and the Big Bang.

I wonder why people think about our universe as that that has started after Big Bang and ignoring what we can deduct by logic. We all know for example that energy doesn't disappear, it changes states. We all know, that even if someone will say that nothing was prior to Big Bang, nothing is something. From this position, what I'm saying is: There is no such universe as that mentioned in 1).

What is mentioned in 1) is the current form of our universe. Of course the Big Bang might have redefined consonants and re-structured everything. But it's still the same energy that existed before that got restructured by the Big Bang.

Once you look beyond Big Bang(s) you can see that the universe is infinite in space and eternal. Lets use some logic deduction. How something can come out of nothing? What possible natural process could have started something out of nothing? Like, there was nothing and then something has happened and we have a universe that is not eternal back in time. And, what would be 'nothing' in that case if not also 'something'? To me, this process of deduction leads to understanding that our universe is eternal.

And about infinite space, how do you imagine the 'end' of the universe? What would be beyond that end? Some have proposed that universe somehow "circles" into itself, but still, what would be outside of that "circling"? Though it's very difficult to my human brain to understand how the universe can be infinite, it is even more difficult for me to understand how it could be finite, considering what would be beyond the finite edge?

3. Just in case some people wouldn't agree with my definitions of universe, I proposed to call "collective everything" as meta-universe, or multiverse. But in fact, meta-universe and multiverse are the same as 2) per my definition. At the same time, there are other definitions of multiverse that I do not imply, and for this reason, if 2) is not so clear, I would rather settle on to call it Time-Space continuum. In any case, those are definitions which people can use in this or other way, and it's not the definition which is important to me. So I'll repeat, by saying Universe, Meta-universe, Multiverse and Time-Continuum I mean one thing - Collective Everything. I hope I have expressed myself clear enough this time. And, I'm hypothesising that it is eternal and infinite.

Interesting, would there editors who would agree, not with that the universe is eternal and infinite, but with that the universe could have been eternal and infinite. And, if they could comment as on the likelihood in their opinion of the universe being eternal and infinite.

I'm interested to know whether there are any reliable sources that use reasoning similar to mine.

That is what I have posted on Reference Desk/Science. Ryanspir (talk) 00:14, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

A reply would be appreciated :). Ryanspir (talk) 11:19, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I lost interest when you started postulating your own cosmologies, sorry! --Mr.98 (talk) 15:59, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

My "own" cosmology is just a quest for truth. Whenever you agree with some points or criticize some, that helps to arrive to some conclusions hopefully. So may you consider to give a last try? All I can say, is that what I have written is based on sense, logic and the determination that energy doesn't appear or disappear, but only changes states. Ryanspir (talk) 18:34, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I miss you

I really do. I understand the reasons for your lack of appetite. I just hope you know that your succinct insights to questions on history, science, and the history of science (and other stuff too, of course) will always be welcomed by readers and askers alike (even if some of them currently can't know it :-) ---Sluzzelin talk 01:11, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)