For real. I read that paragraph expecting to read an explanation. And when I read that, I thought, "oh, this must be the jargon he's railing against, surely the common english must follow." But I was wrong, oh so wrong. I guess I still have no fucking clue what a determinant is.
once you experience THE LAW driving like they've just put away a quart of scotch.
I was on I-95 today and saw a police forensics unit van tailgating the car in front of it for several miles and changing lanes without using a turn signal. When I passed them, I looked over and, sure enough, saw the driver talking on their cellphone. Unbelievable.
There's actually an intelligence test given in the NFL, called the Wonderlic Test, and quarterbacks on average score near the top, but apparently Offensive Tackles and Centers score higher. The Wikipedia article notes that the average score for programmers is 29, a full three points higher than the highest average scores of Offensive Tackles. (Journalists are apparently equivalent to Offensive Tackles on average--puts the newsmedia nicely in perspective.)
So I guess I should listen to my auto-mechanic about heart problems because he happens to have 30 years of experience dealing with carburetors?
This is a rather fatuous straw-man comparison. Clearly Klaus cannot comment on the scientific data itself, and as I read it he does not. His concern stems from the political statements made by some scientists, organizations, and political advocacy groups on the basis of scientific theories. Further, the way in which those groups deal with dissenting opinions is of special concern.
So while Klaus is not a scientist and cannot comment on the scientific data, he most certainly is qualified to comment on the level of political discourse engaged in by the advocacy groups and organizations trumpeting massive socio-political and economic changes based on data that is disputed by at least a small minority of other scientists.
An apt comparison is between economists and political economists. Economists can analyze all the economic data they want and arrive at models that say the best thing we should do is get rid of the minimum wage. Political economists will dispute this because the political arena doesn't function in the same way that economic models do. That Klaus is concerned about the political use of the scientific data, regardless of whether he accepts its veracity or not, is not illegitimate simply because he is not a scientist himself.
Perhaps he is scientifically illiterate. But he's not illiterate in the language used by totalitarians. It seems that no one here is actually commenting on whoVaclav Klaus is.
Klaus was chairman of Civic Forum, the Czech anti-totalitarian movement that was one of two leading groups during the 1989 Velvet Revolution against the Soviet Union's dominance over Czechoslovakia. He's a free market politician (predictably after decades of ruinous Soviet economic predominance) and quite naturally suspicious of totalitarian influence.
If Klaus sees a parallel between the way global warming alarmists and the Soviet totalitarians use language to browbeat their opponents, he at least merits a hearing-out rather than an out-of-hand dismissal.
Look at me, I'm nitpicking a joke until it isn't funny:
First, visual acuity measurements change the denominator, so it wouldn't be 16/20, it would be 20/16. The only problem is that 20/16 is better visual acuity than 20/20. You'd have to go up to 20/25.
That said, I get your joke, very funny, I would mod you up if I had points, but as I don't, this is what you get.
[while the narrator is on the phone with the police] Tyler Durden: Tell him. Tell him, The liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perceptions.
I think the point is that we could ship Firefox with these features implemented as extensions rather than implemented as unremovable, non-optional features.
I would never use Firefox's embarrasingly poor RSS feature, and there's no way that I can get rid of it. There are plenty of other RSS extensions that existed before Firefox integrated it, and frankly they look and work better.
Indeed, pop-up blockers and phishing protection are regularly distributed in the form of plug-ins or toolbars, rather than as integrated features.
Likewise with spellchecking, search suggestions, and session restore--all of which were developed as extensions before being integrated by the firefox team.
I think people here rightfully feel that actual development on the browser itself (massive memory leaks, speed, CSS/DOM, Javascript, cleaning up Gecko) has taken a backseat to adding features that already existed as extensions. Given that the entire point and initial enthusiasm over Firefox was that it was going to be a lean, mean browser, it seems to a lot of people like they were given ye olde bait-n-switch.
Firefox can have all these features, developed as extensions, and bundled with the browser. That way, mom n dad can have their awesome features right out of the box, geeks can strip all the memory-hogging extensions they have no use for, and the developers can spend their goddamn time making THE BROWSER code better, rather than reimplementing existing extensions as features that demand continual future maintenance.
One of the principal goals of "Mozilla 2" is to subject the codebase to "deCOMtamination". Every instance of XPCOM than can be replaced with C++ exceptions will be, in order to reduce the ill effects of XPCOM that you outlined. Unfortunately, Mozilla 2 is estimated to be released as Firefox 4.0 in the first quarter of 2009--so at least a year and a half from now. This remedy may end up being too little too late.
Probably in an effort to make the PowerPC-Intel transition as painless as possible. Rosetta eased things, and recompiling for Intel was made less painful through XCode. I'm sure they wanted to keep enough continuity that they didn't alienate their base of developers any more than they had to with a major architecture switch.
On the contrary, it's fantastic that Wikipedia provides precise information on obscure topics. What's important here is the attitude of experts that they cannot possibly be bothered to explain the broad significance of their subject, and thus that writing articles that are useless to 99.999999% of the population is not a problem, and is in no way contradictory to the aims of a public, free encyclopedia.
That is an absurd and shameful position to take. Every article on Wikipedia could stand to be improved and made more accessible to the general reader. However, editors on math/science articles seem to have a characteristic systemic bias against making any such improvements to their articles. When their articles are tagged with {{importance}} or {{technical}}, the tags are removed with a huff of indignance, rather than with constructive efforts to ameliorate the concerns of other editors about the ability of anyone without a Master's degree to read their article.
An encyclopedia is a tertiary source. Articles should at least have introductory text that does not require an advanced degree in a specialist field to understand. I can get a PhD in international relations and have an understanding of the most esoteric aspects of IR theory, but the fact that the ideas are advanced is not prohibitive of giving a layman's overview of concepts in Constructivist IR theory, such that someone who's not a grad student can get the basic idea, importance, context, significance, etc.
If you want a laymen understandable description of subjects like String Theory (wikipedia is much more laymen in that regard than any journal I even seen!), then go to a public library and pick up a book.
The entire point of Wikipedia is so that I don't have to go to the library and read through several books and journal articles in order to get an overview of a subject. I really just want something that limns the broad outlines of a subject. That's what encyclopedia's do: Wikipedia is not a dumping ground or reposity of expert information. We already have those (i.e. JSTOR). Wikipedia is a tertiary source: overviews of the major authors and themes and important points put together in one place.
If an internet user goes to Wikipedia to look up information, only to find that the article has no information whatsoever giving a general overview of a subject in comprehensible, non-jargon language, then Wikipedia has failed as an encyclopedia.
The point is not to explain entire concepts and fields in 6th-grade English. It's to provide someone an idea of what a subject is about, why it's important, what its context is, and what it is useful for. After doing that, it's perfectly fine to launch into jargon, and proofs, and field-specific obscurities.
Abrogating your responsibility as an expert to do your best to spread knowledge is to accept defeat before even attempting the project. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If we accept the elitist position that some things just cannot be explained to the proles and therefore need not concern themselves with making their efforts the least bit accessible to non-specialists, then it ceases to be an encyclopedia.
Smart people are perfectly capable of writing articles about the things they enjoy, and ought to be encouraged to do so. But they ought to "comment their code" as it were, such that people who are not specialists can at least follow the broad outlines and significance of the subject.
I disagree. The Wikipedia version is not perfect, but it's better than the Wolfram version for an encyclopedia.
Wolfram's audience is already self-selected: people who are already well-versed in math. He doesn't need to set context or explain something's importance. You already know, or at least have an idea, what the context and applications are in a general sense.
Wikipedia's audience is not self-selecting. You cannot assume that the reader will already know anything more than high school math. Therefore, the article sets the context "In mathematics,..." gives the provenance "named after Norwegian mathematician..." gives the definition, and then explains its usefulness, "This makes Lie groups tools for nearly all parts of contemporary mathematics".
Now, Wikipedia's intro text still needs some work in explaining to the lay reader, but it's leagues better than the Wolfram article right off the bat.
You, as a mathematician, find Wolfram to be more useful. The people who write the Wikipedia articles on math and science, are generally mathematicians and scientists, and write things in a manner that is principally useful to them. the point is that they should expend a little more effort and explain up front to the lay person what's going on.
Having a scientifically precise article, and an article that provides the amateur information on context, importance, applicability, etc are not mutually exlusive tasks. Too often, Wikipedia succeeds at the former, while abjectly failing at the latter.
I'm an admin because I was nominated by another user to be an admin and after review the community voted to make me one. I didn't seek it out. Admins don't really exist to write articles anyway. Their principal purpose is to solve user conflicts and enforce Wikipedia policy (along with an obligation to perform some maintenance tasks).
It is not a contradiction in terms to spend a lot of time devoted to making something better, and also voicing strong criticisms of the very same thing. Indeed, I think it would be odd to work with dedication on something and not have criticisms of the project.
I know that Wikipedia is a living document, it is always in a state of being half-written, and will eventually get there. That does not excuse it from criticism or from critical evaluation. Moreover, it does not shield writers and contributors from criticism of shoddy work, much less recalcitrance in the face of legitimate usability concerns.
If I tag an article as using overly {{technical}} language, and editors remove that tag saying "the subject is complex, users can just click on wikilinks to learn what all the terms mean, google it, we can't be bothered to explain it in comprehensible terms", something is wrong. When an article reaches that point, it has ceased being encyclopedic and has become something else.
We don't need more complex articles written by experts for experts. We have Google Scholar to provide reams of papers on complex subjects written in complex terms for experts. An encyclopedia exists to provide overview information on a subject--the important things to know. If an article provides only jargon and minutae, it is ipso facto not an encyclopedic article.
Yes, you can have it both ways. Wikipedia is not paper, it's not a limited resource, or constrained for space.
You write an overview intro section explaining what the topic is, how it relates to other topics, why it's important/relevant, and how it is applied to things.
After you're done with the layman explanation, feel free to dive into complex jargon, LaTeX proofs, and every other academic obscurity you can muster. But don't completely dismiss providing any utility at all to the layperson. Not only is that elitist, it's contrary to the very purpose of an encyclopedia--to be a tertiary source of knowledge suitable for general readership.
You've got it backwards. Wikipedia shouldn't be cited or referenced. It's a starting point. It would be better if the Wikipedia editors (and I'm one of them) took a clue from Beginner's Guide to Physics and wrote a comprehensible explanatory overview of the topic citing that book along the way.
I think the best analogy here is commenting in one's code. It's rather unfair for me to write a thousand lines of complex perl, completely undocumented, and then hand it off to others to maintain. Is it their fault when they don't know where to start, and have to essentially decipher everything I've done in order to figure out what the code does? Absolutely not.
Writing a math/science article on Wikipedia follows the same logic. Write it with expert knowledge and academic-level accuracy, but for god's sake, explain what's going on to people who don't know the subject inside-and-out already.
It's not that inconceivable that someone would land at that page by clicking through links. Say I was reading Godel Escher Bach and wanted to know more about the Wonderous Numbers discussed in the book. I look them up on Wikipedia and I'm redirected to the [[Collatz conjecture]]. That article has poor lead text, but isn't totally incomprehensible when reading through it. I get to the bottom and find a link to [[Residue class-wise affine groups]] under "See also". I click on that, and I'm confronted by an article that makes no sense and has no relevance or information on what exactly this topic is, how it is applied, or why it is important. Wikipedia's usefulness in promoting knowledge and learning has just failed--process terminated, core dumped.
Slashdot Mirror
For real. I read that paragraph expecting to read an explanation. And when I read that, I thought, "oh, this must be the jargon he's railing against, surely the common english must follow." But I was wrong, oh so wrong. I guess I still have no fucking clue what a determinant is.
I bet you rooted for the aliens in Independence Day.
I was on I-95 today and saw a police forensics unit van tailgating the car in front of it for several miles and changing lanes without using a turn signal. When I passed them, I looked over and, sure enough, saw the driver talking on their cellphone. Unbelievable.
Thanks for the video link. To me, this book sounds like a less-insighful, warmed-over version of Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society .
There's actually an intelligence test given in the NFL, called the Wonderlic Test, and quarterbacks on average score near the top, but apparently Offensive Tackles and Centers score higher. The Wikipedia article notes that the average score for programmers is 29, a full three points higher than the highest average scores of Offensive Tackles. (Journalists are apparently equivalent to Offensive Tackles on average--puts the newsmedia nicely in perspective.)
This is a rather fatuous straw-man comparison. Clearly Klaus cannot comment on the scientific data itself, and as I read it he does not. His concern stems from the political statements made by some scientists, organizations, and political advocacy groups on the basis of scientific theories. Further, the way in which those groups deal with dissenting opinions is of special concern.
So while Klaus is not a scientist and cannot comment on the scientific data, he most certainly is qualified to comment on the level of political discourse engaged in by the advocacy groups and organizations trumpeting massive socio-political and economic changes based on data that is disputed by at least a small minority of other scientists.
An apt comparison is between economists and political economists. Economists can analyze all the economic data they want and arrive at models that say the best thing we should do is get rid of the minimum wage. Political economists will dispute this because the political arena doesn't function in the same way that economic models do. That Klaus is concerned about the political use of the scientific data, regardless of whether he accepts its veracity or not, is not illegitimate simply because he is not a scientist himself.
Perhaps he is scientifically illiterate. But he's not illiterate in the language used by totalitarians. It seems that no one here is actually commenting on who Vaclav Klaus is.
Klaus was chairman of Civic Forum, the Czech anti-totalitarian movement that was one of two leading groups during the 1989 Velvet Revolution against the Soviet Union's dominance over Czechoslovakia. He's a free market politician (predictably after decades of ruinous Soviet economic predominance) and quite naturally suspicious of totalitarian influence.
If Klaus sees a parallel between the way global warming alarmists and the Soviet totalitarians use language to browbeat their opponents, he at least merits a hearing-out rather than an out-of-hand dismissal.
Look at me, I'm nitpicking a joke until it isn't funny:
First, visual acuity measurements change the denominator, so it wouldn't be 16/20, it would be 20/16. The only problem is that 20/16 is better visual acuity than 20/20. You'd have to go up to 20/25.
That said, I get your joke, very funny, I would mod you up if I had points, but as I don't, this is what you get.
iTunes was a re-engineered version of SoundJam MP. Apple put a tremendous amount of work into it, but it wasn't a from-scratch Apple creation.
Nice Bad Religion reference. That's my favorite song of theirs.
[while the narrator is on the phone with the police]
Tyler Durden: Tell him. Tell him, The liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perceptions.
Here's a link to Google Geek News. Beta obviously.
Thanks, Essjay.
Firefox 3.0 uses Cairo which does not support Windows 98, NT, or ME. So no, Firefox will no longer run on that platform.
I think the point is that we could ship Firefox with these features implemented as extensions rather than implemented as unremovable, non-optional features.
I would never use Firefox's embarrasingly poor RSS feature, and there's no way that I can get rid of it. There are plenty of other RSS extensions that existed before Firefox integrated it, and frankly they look and work better.
Indeed, pop-up blockers and phishing protection are regularly distributed in the form of plug-ins or toolbars, rather than as integrated features.
Likewise with spellchecking, search suggestions, and session restore--all of which were developed as extensions before being integrated by the firefox team.
I think people here rightfully feel that actual development on the browser itself (massive memory leaks, speed, CSS/DOM, Javascript, cleaning up Gecko) has taken a backseat to adding features that already existed as extensions. Given that the entire point and initial enthusiasm over Firefox was that it was going to be a lean, mean browser, it seems to a lot of people like they were given ye olde bait-n-switch.
Firefox can have all these features, developed as extensions, and bundled with the browser. That way, mom n dad can have their awesome features right out of the box, geeks can strip all the memory-hogging extensions they have no use for, and the developers can spend their goddamn time making THE BROWSER code better, rather than reimplementing existing extensions as features that demand continual future maintenance.
One of the principal goals of "Mozilla 2" is to subject the codebase to "deCOMtamination". Every instance of XPCOM than can be replaced with C++ exceptions will be, in order to reduce the ill effects of XPCOM that you outlined. Unfortunately, Mozilla 2 is estimated to be released as Firefox 4.0 in the first quarter of 2009--so at least a year and a half from now. This remedy may end up being too little too late.
Also see this kuro5hin story.
Probably in an effort to make the PowerPC-Intel transition as painless as possible. Rosetta eased things, and recompiling for Intel was made less painful through XCode. I'm sure they wanted to keep enough continuity that they didn't alienate their base of developers any more than they had to with a major architecture switch.
No, they get it just fine. My iPhone is my next PC.
On the contrary, it's fantastic that Wikipedia provides precise information on obscure topics. What's important here is the attitude of experts that they cannot possibly be bothered to explain the broad significance of their subject, and thus that writing articles that are useless to 99.999999% of the population is not a problem, and is in no way contradictory to the aims of a public, free encyclopedia.
That is an absurd and shameful position to take. Every article on Wikipedia could stand to be improved and made more accessible to the general reader. However, editors on math/science articles seem to have a characteristic systemic bias against making any such improvements to their articles. When their articles are tagged with {{importance}} or {{technical}}, the tags are removed with a huff of indignance, rather than with constructive efforts to ameliorate the concerns of other editors about the ability of anyone without a Master's degree to read their article.
An encyclopedia is a tertiary source. Articles should at least have introductory text that does not require an advanced degree in a specialist field to understand. I can get a PhD in international relations and have an understanding of the most esoteric aspects of IR theory, but the fact that the ideas are advanced is not prohibitive of giving a layman's overview of concepts in Constructivist IR theory, such that someone who's not a grad student can get the basic idea, importance, context, significance, etc.
The entire point of Wikipedia is so that I don't have to go to the library and read through several books and journal articles in order to get an overview of a subject. I really just want something that limns the broad outlines of a subject. That's what encyclopedia's do: Wikipedia is not a dumping ground or reposity of expert information. We already have those (i.e. JSTOR). Wikipedia is a tertiary source: overviews of the major authors and themes and important points put together in one place.
If an internet user goes to Wikipedia to look up information, only to find that the article has no information whatsoever giving a general overview of a subject in comprehensible, non-jargon language, then Wikipedia has failed as an encyclopedia.
The point is not to explain entire concepts and fields in 6th-grade English. It's to provide someone an idea of what a subject is about, why it's important, what its context is, and what it is useful for. After doing that, it's perfectly fine to launch into jargon, and proofs, and field-specific obscurities.
Abrogating your responsibility as an expert to do your best to spread knowledge is to accept defeat before even attempting the project. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If we accept the elitist position that some things just cannot be explained to the proles and therefore need not concern themselves with making their efforts the least bit accessible to non-specialists, then it ceases to be an encyclopedia.
Smart people are perfectly capable of writing articles about the things they enjoy, and ought to be encouraged to do so. But they ought to "comment their code" as it were, such that people who are not specialists can at least follow the broad outlines and significance of the subject.
I disagree. The Wikipedia version is not perfect, but it's better than the Wolfram version for an encyclopedia.
Wolfram's audience is already self-selected: people who are already well-versed in math. He doesn't need to set context or explain something's importance. You already know, or at least have an idea, what the context and applications are in a general sense.
Wikipedia's audience is not self-selecting. You cannot assume that the reader will already know anything more than high school math. Therefore, the article sets the context "In mathematics, ..." gives the provenance "named after Norwegian mathematician ..." gives the definition, and then explains its usefulness, "This makes Lie groups tools for nearly all parts of contemporary mathematics".
Now, Wikipedia's intro text still needs some work in explaining to the lay reader, but it's leagues better than the Wolfram article right off the bat.
You, as a mathematician, find Wolfram to be more useful. The people who write the Wikipedia articles on math and science, are generally mathematicians and scientists, and write things in a manner that is principally useful to them. the point is that they should expend a little more effort and explain up front to the lay person what's going on.
Having a scientifically precise article, and an article that provides the amateur information on context, importance, applicability, etc are not mutually exlusive tasks. Too often, Wikipedia succeeds at the former, while abjectly failing at the latter.
I'm an admin because I was nominated by another user to be an admin and after review the community voted to make me one. I didn't seek it out. Admins don't really exist to write articles anyway. Their principal purpose is to solve user conflicts and enforce Wikipedia policy (along with an obligation to perform some maintenance tasks).
It is not a contradiction in terms to spend a lot of time devoted to making something better, and also voicing strong criticisms of the very same thing. Indeed, I think it would be odd to work with dedication on something and not have criticisms of the project.
I know that Wikipedia is a living document, it is always in a state of being half-written, and will eventually get there. That does not excuse it from criticism or from critical evaluation. Moreover, it does not shield writers and contributors from criticism of shoddy work, much less recalcitrance in the face of legitimate usability concerns.
If I tag an article as using overly {{technical}} language, and editors remove that tag saying "the subject is complex, users can just click on wikilinks to learn what all the terms mean, google it, we can't be bothered to explain it in comprehensible terms", something is wrong. When an article reaches that point, it has ceased being encyclopedic and has become something else.
We don't need more complex articles written by experts for experts. We have Google Scholar to provide reams of papers on complex subjects written in complex terms for experts. An encyclopedia exists to provide overview information on a subject--the important things to know. If an article provides only jargon and minutae, it is ipso facto not an encyclopedic article.
Yes, you can have it both ways. Wikipedia is not paper, it's not a limited resource, or constrained for space.
You write an overview intro section explaining what the topic is, how it relates to other topics, why it's important/relevant, and how it is applied to things.
After you're done with the layman explanation, feel free to dive into complex jargon, LaTeX proofs, and every other academic obscurity you can muster. But don't completely dismiss providing any utility at all to the layperson. Not only is that elitist, it's contrary to the very purpose of an encyclopedia--to be a tertiary source of knowledge suitable for general readership.
You've got it backwards. Wikipedia shouldn't be cited or referenced. It's a starting point. It would be better if the Wikipedia editors (and I'm one of them) took a clue from Beginner's Guide to Physics and wrote a comprehensible explanatory overview of the topic citing that book along the way.
I think the best analogy here is commenting in one's code. It's rather unfair for me to write a thousand lines of complex perl, completely undocumented, and then hand it off to others to maintain. Is it their fault when they don't know where to start, and have to essentially decipher everything I've done in order to figure out what the code does? Absolutely not.
Writing a math/science article on Wikipedia follows the same logic. Write it with expert knowledge and academic-level accuracy, but for god's sake, explain what's going on to people who don't know the subject inside-and-out already.
It's not that inconceivable that someone would land at that page by clicking through links. Say I was reading Godel Escher Bach and wanted to know more about the Wonderous Numbers discussed in the book. I look them up on Wikipedia and I'm redirected to the [[Collatz conjecture]]. That article has poor lead text, but isn't totally incomprehensible when reading through it. I get to the bottom and find a link to [[Residue class-wise affine groups]] under "See also". I click on that, and I'm confronted by an article that makes no sense and has no relevance or information on what exactly this topic is, how it is applied, or why it is important. Wikipedia's usefulness in promoting knowledge and learning has just failed--process terminated, core dumped.