User talk:SteveBaker/archive11

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Original research in fringe articles

I would appreciate it if you would back up your claim here, as it is a rather major one that needs to be updated in the policy page if true! Thanks. ImpIn

— (t - c) 01:21, 21 June 2008 (UTC), ImperfectlyInformed

I'd still like an answer on this. ImpIn | (t - c) 02:35, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Top Gear

Many thanks for taking the time out to look over both my edit history and that of User:Dp76764 - and for posting your findings on Talk:Top Gear (current format). It's much appreciated. Cheers. DrFrench (talk) 17:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

RfA Review

Hello SteveBaker. I've noticed that you have a completed set of responses to the RfA Review question phase at User:SteveBaker/RfA review , but they don't seem to be included on the list of responses here. If you've completed your responses, please can you head to Wikipedia:RfA Review/Question/Responses and add a link to them at the bottom of the list so that they get included in the research. We have a closing date of midnight UTC on 1st July, so please add your link before this date. Once again, thank you for taking the time to participate in the Question Phase of RfA Review.Gazimoff WriteRead 16:25, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Frbaerj

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/71.120.11.200

Fraberj again..I dont know the procedure to report it....


Guyonthesubway (talk) 21:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)


3RR warning

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform a large number of reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring, even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Please do not repeatedly revert edits, but use the talk page to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. If necessary, pursue dispute resolution. Godraegpot (talk) 13:45, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

That's not true - I have reverted only once today. On the other hand, you seem to have reverted that same change FIVE times over the same 24 hour period. I'll be very happy when your sockpuppet conviction gets sorted out and I don't have to put up with all this nonsense from you and your socks. SteveBaker (talk) 13:53, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

He tried to report me for violating 3RR as well. So I've reported him. Here's the report. Looneyman (talk) 14:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I think we need to start 'checkuser' proceedings. We don't want to have to prove that each one of these socks is Davesmith individually. SteveBaker (talk) 15:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree. This guy is quite the fool. I was willing to give him th benefit of the doubt when he first appeared but when he was in that edit war (where I reported him) it becam eobvious who he was. Looneyman (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Your edit summary

Hello SteveBaker. Please take note that your edit summary here uses the term Wikilawyering. I believe the article does not fit the circumstances of wikilawyering. Hence, according to it's own page, the misuses section, this may be viewed as aggressive or even pejorative. I would tend to believe, in this circumstance it was only aggression. "In any case an accusation in wikilawyering is never a valid argument per se"... and the meaning of WP:WL appears to be axed towards those who "engage in semantic discussions about the language of a policy or guideline". I trust this will help us build a more civil and constructive edit summary. Could you please consider avoiding this word in your edit summary and consider the expression, "please see talk page" instead. Thank you. --CyclePat (talk) 17:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

In short - no. The Wikilawyering page is merely an essay - it is neither policy nor guideline - but merely the opinion of one or a few people - I consider myself perfectly within the range of acceptable behavior to use the term in contexts where it is appropriate - and in this case I actually did so within the suggestions made on that page. You have persistently (and unreasonably) demanded a reference for the meaning of a common English word and you claim that saying "this is a kind of that" when 'this' is what the article is all about and 'that' is a common English word is original research. You have provoked many pages of discussion over nit-picking points surrounding a simple sentence that serves to explain the use of a technical term. This amounts to using the Wiki guidelines as an editing weapon - and that, without doubt, falls within the bounds of the use of the term "Wikilawyering" - so I don't feel any compunction in "calling a spade a spade" and using the term where it's appropriate and in an edit summary where brevity is critical. Furthermore - the Wikilawyering page says that the term is often used as a shorthand term - as was intended in this case. I was merely referring back to our conversation on the talk page in a shorthand way. I had in fact already written extensively about my opinion on the Talk page shortly before reverting your changes in order to explain my position. SteveBaker (talk) 19:20, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I hope you understand, I really want to see the inclusion of that one sentence. It appears to make sense, despite the fact that it's not properly refernced. My fear is that we may be wrong. We must remain objective. What if Meyer was actually on to something. Are we dismissing it with our own synthesis? So, in reality, what I'm doing here is taking two sides. I actually support both because I want to see this article grow and better clarify the subject matter; This methodology is less aggressive and, I believe, helps in resolving any conflict. In short, all we need is a proper reference because this is going to be a synthesis. If A (Meyer's Cell) is "description" and B (Fuel Cell Dictionary definition) is "description" = conclusion? (Is there not some sophism). Another example: can we tell that if A is Meyer cell and B is Orange that c is ? A synth has so many variables and in this example we can't make conclusion. --CyclePat (talk) 06:32, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Talk:Water-fuelled car

FYI: I took the liberty of removing your last post to Talk:Water-fuelled car since, in my opinion, it had nothing to do with improving the article. I kinda bungled the edit summary though. What meant to say was "steve, i like you and all, but i fail to see how this has *anything* at do with improving this article. User talk:Gdewilde would be the best place for this. removed post." Anyways, I hope you agree. If not, go ahead and restore it--unlike some folks we've run into lately, I'm not about to edit war over this kind of thing. Cheers. Yilloslime (t) 16:17, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, it appears that User:Gdewilde has reverted me, so... Anyway, I figured his wikibreak would be a short one... Yilloslime (t) 21:22, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I was personally attacked - I felt I had some kind of right of reply. No biggie. SteveBaker (talk) 02:00, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Top Gear

Are you willing to reach a negotiated settlement re: the Top Gear issues, or do we carry on with the fun and games? Please see the Top Gear discussion page for more details. SabineSchmitz (talk) 18:34, 12 July 2008 (UTC)


This is ridiculous. We have a complete consensus about what to do about TGD - the only person with a contrary position have received an indefinite block - and then proceeded to rampage around with sock puppets. If you think I'm giving in to an abusive editor in the face of such solid consensus, you are out of your mind. No compromise of any kind is either possible or necessary. SteveBaker (talk) 02:06, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

User:CyclePat/CyclePat's

Good spot. No, I hadn't read that. I'll deal with it sometime in the next 24 hours. I'm only checking what's up at the moment, but I'll be back to sort it if no-one else does first. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 09:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Mood Chart Image

I apologize for the mistake - I didn't realize this problem. The picture should be removed from the article. Thanks. --Shruti14 t c s 20:30, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

FYI User:Gdewilde blocked

He just got indef'ed (and also said he was leaving on his own, but he's said that before, and he said it a few minutes after the indef if I read the log timestamps correctly:) DMacks (talk) 03:55, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, he's certainly behaved pretty badly - notably with his tendency to delete large chunks of 'Talk:' page material that he disagrees with - and his 'cleaning' of his own talk page whenever anyone says anything he doesn't like. He's also block-copied copyrighted material into Talk: pages on several occasions...but I think he was doing it with the best of intentions and (as with many Internet users) under the mistaken belief that "if it's out there it must be OK to copy it". IMHO, these traits have rarely risen to a serious level so I wouldn't say that this behavior has risen to the point where I would have blocked him...but that's only on the basis of the handful of articles I've been working on with him - you obviously know better! But he's certainly been a pain to work with. It sounds like the terms of the block allow for readmission if he's prepared to offer the right promises - so I think it's not too unfair. SteveBaker (talk) 04:09, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
You have much more patience than I do:) No seriously, you still managed to have some rational and new/novel-information rebuttals even when he was engaged in long-ago-lost (for him) revert wars. I was not quite ready to block him myself, but barring a major change I have no doubt someone would have done it soon anyway. FWIW, deleting one's own talk-page content is generally okay, as long as it's not changing the meaning of what is there (but removal indicates having read the removed content). Whatever, back to the editting:) DMacks (talk) 04:26, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Yeah - I'm well aware that it's technically OK to delete one's own Talk page content - but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating when there are three-way discussions going on or if you're trying to see what other complaints have been made against him! That's really my point - he generally manages to stay JUST on the side of legal behavior - rarely making 3RR's but making 2RR's frequently - that kind of thing. Legal but not nice. Well, anyway - I agree that something like this was bound to happen eventually. I'm trying my best not to rejoice in the fact. SteveBaker (talk) 04:39, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Free energy suppression

Like the expansion you've done ...

Needs more content ...

Just thought I'd say ....

J. D. Redding 15:45, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

I feel your pain

... about the HHO/mason jar scam. Fortunately, there's no need for WP:SYN; a number of reasonably reliable sources have identified this as either ineffective or an out-and-out scam. I left a list for you at WT:FRINGE. MastCell Talk 17:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Interesting?

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209900956&cid=NL_eet —Preceding unsigned comment added by Guyonthesubway (talk • contribs) 14:26, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

OK - so their plan is to use excess solar power to electrolyse some water - then to run that through a fuel cell to turn it back into water at night. So essentially - they are just building an electrical storage system - it's really nothing to do with solar panels. Then they say something utterly incomprehensible: "The hard part of getting water to split is not the hydrogen -- platinum as a catalyst works fine for the hydrogen. But platinum works very poorly for oxygen, making you use much more energy," - the guy is a chemistry professor at MIT so I'm nervous about saying this is meaningless babble...but electrolysing water is about pulling apart the hydrogen and the oxygen...how can pulling two things apart depend more on one thing than the other?! It's not like you can electrolyse with a platinum catalyst and get just hydrogen out! So I don't know what he's saying. But if they've made electrolysis much closer to 100% efficient, that's a major win for the planet. It makes the idea of hydrogen powered cars much more attractive because we can make cheaper hydrogen without messing around with Methane and the consequent CO2 waste product - and it means that using an electrolysis/gas-storage/fuel-cell setup to store power efficiently look like it might be a better alternative to batteries. But storing hydrogen in a small space is a nasty problem - so these wouldn't be small batteries - they'd be HUGE things.
As for making 24/7 solar panels - you don't need this to do that. You put the solar panels on the roof of your house and you route excess power out onto the electrical grid and sell it to the electricity company - then at night you use the money you earned during the day to buy grid electricity. The electricity company acts as an infinitely large battery that costs nothing to buy or maintain! In most US states, the electric company is required to let you do this - and typically, what happens is that when you "sell" electricity, it's really just driving your electric meter backwards. So the meter runs backwards during the day and forwards at night - and if you get it right, you have a $0 electric bill.
So right now - unless you are "off-grid" - which is unlikely and inconvenient for most people - you don't need this gadget. So except (perhaps) in 3rd world countries with no grid electricity - this device is a solution in search of a problem.
SteveBaker (talk) 14:47, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
I can help out with a bit of this. Dan Nocera isn't above dumbing stuff down in a flashy way for the general public. Right now he is a PI on a big grant called powering the planet, frankly I have issues with a lot of their work. Academically I've worked in the same field. When he says 100% current efficiency he is only saying that every electron is transfered form a formal O2- to a formal H+ to eventually form O2 and H2. Most systems are close to 100% so he is being deceptive here. The real issue is the voltage (potential) of the those electrons (current). How much extra voltage is required is called overpotential. The electrolysis of water has at least two overpotentials (before further distinctions are made) one for each half reaction. This gets into the other point of confusion the cleavage of water is split between two electrodes each preforming different half reactions. The overpotential can be reduced to nothing with the use of a good electrocatalyst, for example platinum is excellent at the cathode where protons are reduced to hydrogen. Sadly there is no known catalysts for the oxidation of water to oxygen. Its a minimum four electron process, which translates into a pain in the ass. Its true that different electrodes catalysis this oxidation with different effectiveness but this anode catalyst is still the weakest link for the electrolysis of water. Nocera group is also working on overpotential problem. I wish they where investigating the problem differently but that is all technical opinion. Besides there are a lot of other groups working on the issue.
Solving the intermittence issue of energy sources like wind and solar is a big issue. For the private individual your solution is fine Steve but its worth noting that the laws in most states are such that electricity providers never have to pay you if you produce more than you use. That is you pay them or your bill is 0$. For the application of solar and wind on utility scale, producers need to be able to reliably supply a certain amount of electricity otherwise they can't charge as much to the distributer who charges the consumer. There are many solutions to this intermittence problem one of which is the electrolysis of water which is what John OʼM. Bockris was talking about when he coined the term “hydrogen economy”.
Now hydrogen as an stationary energy storage medium isn't tragic even if its not ideal. Backup generation of electricity can be done with batteries, hydrogen with PEM fuel cells, or ICE generators. Depending on the scale of the energy needs the hydrogen solution can be much smaller (and more scalable) than batteries even when using standard 2000 psi cylinders.
Thought this information might be useful to you. Especially since you are actually willing to take the time to explain things to the masses.
--OMCV (talk) 15:42, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
Wow! That's deep stuff. My knowledge of chemistry (and electrochemistry in particular) is weak - so it'll take me a while to do enough background reading to understand what you wrote. Of course you are right about the grid being a non-solution to intermittancy when you do it on a large scale. I know you can't reduce your energy bill below $0 using only the grid - but if you have excess capacity even over a 24 hour period, I don't see a reasonable way to sell it to anyone anyway. So $0 is about the best you'll get either on or off-grid.
Thanks for the information - I'm always interested in this stuff, even if it does take some self-education before I can understand it all! Explaining things to people helps me to 'internalize' the knowledge - so I'm rather obsessive about explaining things I learned recently. Stuff I know well (computer graphics, programming, video game design, antique cars)...are things I don't generally feel the need to talk much about - it's old news.
This must be an exciting time to be involved in the energy business!
SteveBaker (talk) 16:50, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
One can, in the UK, actually sell electricity to the grid, and get real cash money for it. DuncanHill (talk) 16:55, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
For what its worth Steve, I think you're doing a great job with these important subjects. Duncan, I understand Germany also has legal frame work insuring small time generators get paid. Hopefully we get something similar going in the US. It would raise demand for solar cells on private homes and businesses and in the process distributing production and reducing transmission costs.--OMCV (talk) 17:41, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
The term is Net_metering and according to the article, is being implemented in the US. Guyonthesubway (talk) 18:49, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
As far as I know the ecoonmics just aren't there for solar. But given favorable conditions for wind or very small hydro you can make a few bucks. Having a look here http://www.njcleanenergy.com/renewable-energy/programs/solar-renewable-energy-certificates-srec/faqs/faqs#anchor_new_9999 you can see that you will in fact be paid for energy you generate above your usage. So you could in fact do better than 0$. Guyonthesubway (talk) 18:50, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
The problem is that it ends up being like cars that run on used cooking oil - it's a great thing when only a few people are doing it. But if everyone in the country wanted to sell back electricity during the day and suck it back at night - then it would be very hard for the generation companies to cope with having to effectively shut down their power plants during the day. It's perhaps not too bad with coal/oil/gas plants where most of the cost is in the fuel itself - but for nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, hydro...all of those things have free fuel - but the capital cost of the equipment is driving the costs. In those cases, shutting them down during the day so that you can buy power back from your users is extremely inefficient. So this is going to work OK for a while - but once everyone wants to do it and we get away from fossil fuel generators...the system will have to change. Still, I figure we're probably for at least the lifespan of any solar panels that I buy now - so this is a consideration for the future only. SteveBaker (talk) 21:06, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
I suspect that energy storage could be more efficient when centralized. Its easy to imagine a single central electric repositroy (in the form of hydrogen or even [[1]]) serving a area. I'm also not sure what electric usage patterns look like, obviously both electric usage for airconditioning and solar generation would both peak on sunny days. Guyonthesubway (talk) 21:22, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
Yeah - there are schemes like the Dinorwig Power Station - the largest construction project ever undertaken in the UK at the time. They built a pair of artificial lakes - one at the top of a large hill, the other at the bottom. When there is spare capacity they pump water up to the topmost lake - when they need the power back again, they run the water back down through turbines to regenerate hydroelectric power. It's between 70 and 80% efficient - which isn't bad. What's impressive is that it can go from storing power at it's maximum rate to regenerating it at it's maximum rate in just over a minute! SteveBaker (talk) 22:27, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Besides alternative technologies for energy production and storage, a major consideration is what to do with existing infrastructure. Crops can be planted around coal power plants, and the CO2 can be extracted from the exhaust gases to promote growth. This can be be used as an alternative or in conjunction with sequestering. Noah Seidman (talk) 01:15, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Ehhh - no. That's a bit of a stretch! Have you crunched the numbers? (No - of course you haven't - it's MUCH easier to have happy thoughts without doing any horrid math - that's my job - right?!)...
When you burn twelve tons of coal, which is nearly pure carbon - you get something like 44 tons of CO2. In order to have that absorbed into plants, you'd have to absorb that carbon into the carbohydrates of the plants that you harvest. Every ton of carbon would produce two and a quarter tons of starches and sugars - plus whatever water and trace elements would be present in the plants...so you'd need to grow and harvest maybe 4 tons of plants to squester the carbon from every ton of coal you burned. A typical coal fired power station consumes about 10,000 tons of coal per day according to our article. So your sequestration fields have to produce 40,000 tons of plant material PER DAY. Worse still, you've only "sequestered" the carbon if you put the plants someplace where they don't decompose and produce CO2. What you most CERTAINLY can't do is use the plants to feed humans or animals or to make bio-fuels like ethanol or burn them for energy production - because doing that is putting all of that CO2 back into the air. You can't even just let the plants die and decay away. So pretty much all you could legitimately do would be to dump the plants underground - perhaps in the very coal mines you dug your coal from. But 40,000 tons of plants EVERY DAY!!! That's about a dozen 100 car railroad trainloads every day.
Do you have any CONCEPTION how much that is?!?! It's a lot of fields. Switchgrass (a particularly fast growing plant that doesn't need too much fertilizer) produces between 1 and 5 tons per acre per year [2]...depending on the amount of water available. Let's be generous and say each acre of land produces 4 tons of switchgrass per year. But 4 tons per YEAR isn't enough - we need 40,000 tons per DAY! So 356x40,000/4 = three and a half MILLION acres would be have to be laid down as switchgrass - an area about the same at the entire state of Connecticut for each and every coal-fired power station!!! And the entire harvest MUST be buried and not used for any purpose whatever. In fact, to be truly carbon-neutral, you'd need to plant and then bury a lot more than that to account for the carbon required to plough, plant, fertilize, water, harvest, ship and then just bury all of those thousands of tons of grass! Worse still, the land that you turn over to switchgrass production would have to be someplace where not many plants are already growing...if you plough up grassland or forest to make room for your carbon sequestration farm - you've REDUCED the amount of CO2 absorbers in the process. So the land you use has to be mostly dirt - a desert for example. But places without plants are hard places to grow plants...so your productivity won't be as good as 4 tons per acre.
Nah - this is a COMPLETE non-starter. Carbon sequestration is a JOKE. It's not going to work. Clean coal is an oxymoron - we need wind, solar and nuclear (preferably fusion rather than fission) - and more than anything else, we need to conserve - use less. There isn't any kind of quick fix.
SteveBaker (talk) 02:56, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
Actually CO2 reuse is already happening in the Netherlands, I believe it's Shell doing it in conjunction with a group of greenhouses (at Groningen, NL? Sorry, I've already passed the magazine along, I'll try to recover if anyone wishes). This is not sequestration, it is reuse, "waste" heat from the generating plant is used to heat the greenhouses and "waste" CO2 is used to enhance plant growth.
The neat solution to net metering or lack thereof is just to create an incorporated company to own your solar/wind/tidal power assets. As long as you know how to do basic bookkeeping, lots of jurisdictions pay (sometimes ridiculously) high prices for renewable energy and that's what your corporation earns. As far as the electricity you have to pay to light and heat your house, hey, you're just another little guy getting screwed by the man, you deserve the rates kept deliberately low. Do the math - I'm not saying, I'm just saying...
And I'll say it again - watch out for hydrogen. H2 is a small molecule, it creeps into everything, finds every flaw, and brittles up everything it can get its hands on. My only experience is from the petrochemical industry and there hydrogen was treated with great respect - high-end stainless steel alloys, full-penetration/zero-inclusion welds, it got more attention than cyanide and suchlike common or garden-variety deadly compounds. There were lots of acute compounds like cyanide, but hydrogen was probably the biggest systemic problem - H2 is highly mobile and highly reactive, That bit is total speculation and original research on my part. I'm sayin' it now on the chance I'll be able to say told-ya later. Pure speculation. Franamax (talk) 12:48, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
Aw dammitt! I was ending with a flourish about how the best energy use is switching it off, but I backspaced (it's real late/early here :). And I see that's what SteveB ended with. So yeah, don't try to generate and store it, just don't use it. What he said :) Franamax (talk) 12:54, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
Sure - you can take the waste heat and do useful things with it - the Netherlands have been doing "Combined Heat and Power" schemes for decades and they're a great idea for cold countries...not much use in Texas though! Redirecting CO2 to these greenhouses may be a WONDERFUL publicity stunt - but the area of plants required to absorb the CO2 from just one decent size power station is (as I pointed out before) 3.5 million acres...5,400 square miles. The Netherlands only covers 16,000 square miles - so even if you used every scrap of land in the whole of the Netherlands you'd be able to sequester the CO2 from three coal-fired power stations. But even if you did that - as I pointed out before - you can't harvest the plants as crops and let people or animals eat them - because that would cause the CO2 to be released again...and that's not sequestration - it's just postponing the inevitable. Worse still, the plants that are being "fed" CO2 from the power station aren't absorbing CO2 from the air - so actually, doing this just made things a little worse from a global warming perspective!
SteveBaker (talk) 00:45, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Well you're right. But elevated CO2 enhances primary production so many greenhouses burn (typically) natural gas to elevate the CO2 levels, which is nuts. So at least using the byproducts (heat and CO2) of power generation is just a little bit more rational. The benefit is in using higher-than-normal CO2 levels to enhance plant growth, but it certainly doesn't solve the primary problem, it just reduces waste. You're also right that it doesn't really help Texas all that much, I don't know what to say about a state where it's over 95 deg.F. for weeks on end and you freeze your ass off when you go to a restaurant.
My point I guess would be that in many respects Europe is ahead in considering communal solutions (horrible though that sounds) to reduce waste, as opposed to North Americans. I'll leave my standing points about deviously considering net metering and watching out for "the hydrogen economy". And I guess I'll have to point out that here in Vancouver, we're starting to use our poo to derive energy. That too may be delaying the inevitable, but at least I feel like I'm making a contribution twice a day! :) Franamax (talk) 01:21, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Sure, I'm not saying "don't route CO2 to greenhouses" - I'm saying "Don't claim that because you're routing 0.0001% of your waste CO2 to the greenhouses that you are sequestering carbon because (a) it's a tiny drop in a vast bucket and (b) y ou aren't sequestering it anyway!"...The problem we're about to come slamming into (especially if McCain wins the US presidency) is that the "Clean Coal" people are monsterously exaggerating their ability to sequester CO2. They talk about "Clean Coal" as if this was something we could actually use - when in fact, we basically have no clue how to do it and NOBODY has ever sequestered CO2 on any kind of industrial scale. If we don't keep alert and keep people informed about whan an enormous LIE is being put forth here, we'll have the most polluting power generation approach known to mankind (non-clean-Coal) with a promise to retrofit the carbon sequestration stuff when the technology becomes available. But in reality, that technology may NEVER become available and we'll just be building large numbers of dirty-coal plants and digging ourselves ever deeper into the global warming crisis. Hence, when someone says "Hey we could just plant the areas around our power plants" - with the implication that this somehow helps - we've got to jump in with the numbers and PROVE that this is a load of old hogwash. Ditto with feeding CO2 to greenhouses. So far - we have NO WAY to make coal be ecologically acceptable.
Here in Texas, we have a wind energy plan that will add 5 GigaWatts of wind energy plants by 2015. This sounds really great until you discover that Texas produces 10,000 GigaWatts of energy from coal...and plans to add 10 more large coal-fired plants by 2013. So if those are fairly typical 600 MWatt plants - then two years before we finish building 5 GWatts of windmills, we'll have expanded coal generation by 6 GWatts...which is hardly a step forwards!
This is utterly ridiculous. With one stroke of a legislator's pen, we could (for example) ban incandescent lamp sales in (say) 5 years time. People would switch to LED or (possibly) CFL lighting - and that would save about 1.5% of our total energy consumption. 1% of 10,000 Gwatts is 100 Gwatts - so passing that law would enable us to decommission 60 coal power plants instead of building 10 new ones! California is heading that way...but Texas is going to build more coal-fired power plants!!
But still, we're told by McCain that coal is our most abundant local energy source (which would be true if we didn't have global warming to contend with) and "clean" coal is the answer to all of our problems (when it's a technology that doesn't come close to existing yet).
So - be careful - you don't want to give people the impression that a few greenhouses are the answer to global warming! SteveBaker (talk) 02:49, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
This is a fascinating conversation to watch, do keep it up I'm learning a lot! BTW, incandescent bulbs are being phased out in the EU. DuncanHill (talk) 09:58, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
The business of using legislation rather than letting market forces do their work is important in this case. If you replace all of the incandescent lamps in your home with CFL's. it'll save you about 7% on your electric bill. For me, that's about $15 bucks a month. It's barely worth the effort. But on the scale of an entire US state - it represents 60 large and nasty power plants that can be closed down. The benefit to the individual is so small that you NEED the legislation to force people to do things that they don't exactly oppose - but are just to sluggish to get done without being nudged firmly. Things get much worse when you need people to do things that actually make life marginally worse for them as individuals. SteveBaker (talk) 02:11, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
Again, no big arguments from me. Clean Coal - isn't that trademarked yet? What a great marketing slogan! As I recall, they're still not even insisting that new coal plants have the space and plumbing to add CO2 sequestration (although I believe there was a recent buyout in Texas where they dropped plans for a few of those coal plants).
The biggest project I know of is at Weyburn, Sask and as you say, it is not even close to the scale of capturing even 0.1% of the emissions of just Texas. I'm personally interested in whether or not pumping CO2 underground will combine with groundwater to form vast amounts of carbonic acid to start eating away at the rocks. How many years will that take to show an effect? And the first time a CO2 reservoir leaks away, maybe kills 35 people in the process, and when we want redress it turns out - oops, it's a separate corporation whose only asset is the CO2 storage field and it already paid all its profits out as dividends so there's no redress for anything.
Now on the lighting issue, LED's maybe. I use CFL's but I also have a long ingrained habit to only turn on a light when I need it - so the CFL I tried in the bathroom lasted about 1/16 the rated life, you can't switch them on and off. Add in the extra energy needed to make a CFL and the fact that if I just throw it in the garbage (which I don't, but many people will do) you need 9 cu.m. of landfill soil to neutralize the mercury, hmmm. So don't jump to a flat-out ban on incandescents, but yes people, turn it off when you leave the room. Especially when you have the AC on - at least in the north, leaving the light on just helps to heat your home for half the year.
One idea for this which would probably be absolutely hateful for a Texan is to tax the hell out of carbon emissions, preferably at the consumer level. A tax level high enough that even wealthy people would pay attention to. Then (and this is important!) you reduce taxes on everything else, and you give every human being a license to emit a certain amount of carbon, aka a tax credit. Now the choice is yours, emit less carbon and you can put money in your pocket to use for other things. People can sell you products that use less carbon, so minds get focussed on doing just that. Industry might actually upgrade their electric motors (there's 1.5% of consumption right there), insulate their buildings properly. A million little things would happen. Of course, this means changing lifestyles but that's what the debate is about, life as usual ain't gonna cut it (unless we use that new clean coal they're talking about :) And, you would have to trust your government to do it properly, which is a really big sticking point. It looks like the next elections here in British Columbia and in Canada as a whole will revolve around carbon taxes, so keep an eye out, we have very similar lifestyles but the debate is a little more advanced here. Franamax (talk) 11:21, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure that's exactly a tax. Its more like capturing the cost to the world of those emissions. I'm against forcing people to do anything, but I'm all for charging them what it really costs. Capture the actual cost of coal (after the carbon cost), and suddenly solar and wind will look far cheaper. Never mind nuclear, though. Figure the cost of waste disposal...is Yucca mountain even open yet? Once the costs are accounted for, feel free to use an incandescent bulb and leave it on all day. You'll change your mind once you get the bill. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Guyonthesubway (talk • contribs) 13:37, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
The problem with pumping CO2 underground is that there is a HECK of a lot of the stuff. For each gallon of oil or kilogram of coal, you have an IMMENSE volume of CO2 produced. If you take the line the clean coal proponents take, you're going to pump the CO2 back into the hole you dug the coal out of. But that means that your CO2 has to be crushed down to a density comparable to a lump of coal...it has to be liquified. But to liquify a three and a half kilograms of CO2 and haul it off to storage takes 95% of the energy you got from creating it by burning one kilogram of coal. So your power station becomes HORRIBLY inefficient - and you're still filling up the holes three and a half times faster than you're making those holes. Finding underground storage for liquid CO2 is going to become a major problem. SteveBaker (talk) 02:11, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
CFL's are certainly a bit nasty with the mercury and all - but they use a tiny fraction of the mercury of an old-fashioned florescent tube - and those things are EVERYWHERE. Also, I see CFL's as an intermediate step until we go over to LED lighting - which is really the ideal in terms of power consumption, longevity, colour and ultimate impact when you toss one out. But right now, as bad as mercury is to the environment, we know how to remediate the problem - and the consequences of mercury influx into our landfills that are already filled with who-knows-what nasty poisons is something we can live with for a few more generations. The CO2/greenhouse problem is very immediate and as far as we can tell, impossible to remediate. So let's save the ENTIRE planet first - then we can come back and fix up the landfills later. At this stage, we can't afford to try to fix ALL of the problems at once. For example - to get out of this hole we've dug ourselves, we're going to need nuclear power...and as difficult, dangerous and polluting as it is, it's well worth that for the CO2 savings it gets us. Orbital solar power or fusion energy from Helium-3 that we mine on the moon are great things to do - but we're just not there yet. In the meantime, we'll have to use CFL's and we just have to live with the consequences for now. SteveBaker (talk) 14:54, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Ay, there's the rub. The CO2 problem unfortunately is not immediate. The CO2 emitted when you drive your Hummer to the mall to get a latte today won't trap infrared radiation from the Earth's surface for a few years, until it has time to diffuse through the atmospheric column. After that, it will be a problem for 100-250 years. It's not like ground-level ozone like what might wreck the Olympics a week from now - it's not something we all can see and understand. And many of us, from whatever part of the world, step outside every day and look at that brown sky - we haven't even solved that problem yet! Why worry about abstract problems like extinction of Ursus maritimus because of massive climate change in the Arctic? (This is the point where someone steps in to say, no, the same thing is not happening in the Antarctic, so the theory must be wrong).
The problem with CO2 and equivalent IR trapping substances is precisely that they do not present immediate effects, they have long-term and cumulative effects. Thus, there is always a rationale for someone to say "lets think about this a little longer". BUT - we do have to think about the short-term effects when we try to mitigate, the mercury-poisoned individual living near the landfill will not be comforted knowing they've helped to save the planet. So what about legislation that anyone who sells light bulbs must also accept old light bulbs for recycling? What about the legislation in Germany where you can rip off all the stupid extra packaging right in the store and throw it on the counter (think about a simple USB flash drive and the huge impenetrable case it comes in) and it's up to the store to deal with it.
And yes, nuclear is a piece of the puzzle - but why can't we complete the fuel cycle? It's all supposed to eventually turn into lead or whatever. If we keep throwing neutrons at it and separating the good stuff out, we'll end up with no waste at all. Why don't we do that? Cost! It costs too much, just like a previous comment that wind and solar will look less expensive, the reason is that energy needs to become much more expensive than it is right now. Again, this is a role for government, investment to complete the nuclear cycle; stop using mercury in lighting; find better technologies to extract energy from coal and tar sands; legislate efficiency standards in housing and commercial buildings. And deliberately increase the cost of energy, beyond the recent run-up in prices.
It strikes me that I should probably stop my ranting. Sorry SteveBaker for cluttering your talk page. Environmental issues get me going and have for 30 years, so I see the carbon problem within that context. The problems are everywhere, which is not the origin of this thread. Thanks for the productive discussion! Franamax (talk) 16:14, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Well, I'm the biggest rant contributor so far!
The business of nuclear waste being potentially valuable is an interesting one. The designers of the Yucca mountain nuclear waste dump had a tough design problem - they needed to create warning signs that would still be meaningful in 100,000 years. They had to allow for the possibility of a breakdown of civilisation - the possible loss of present day languages and writing - to produce a sign that would simultaneously say "Insanely dangerous stuff buried here" - AND - "Potential source of rare and valuable metals here if your technology is good enough to dig them up". If you get a chance to read their full design process and recommendations, it's a fascinating read.
Mercury in a dump could take out a few hundred or a few thousand people - but we have plenty of people and they are a renewable resource. So poisoning a few is (in global terms) not so terrible. It's interesting to see how AMAZINGLY well animals and plants have bounced back in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown site...animals don't live long enough to suffer too terribly from cancers and leucemia - and the benefits of having no humans around more than makes up for that. But CO2 has the potential to wreck the entire planet - and in a way from which humans and animals won't easily recover.
The business of the latency of CO2 - the time between when you produce the stuff and when it gets up high enough in the atmosphere to cause a problem is certainly in the decades. What we do now is mostly for the benefit of our kids and grandkids. We may never live long enough to see the results...either way. However, the purpose of a being is to pass on it's genes into future generations - and the best way to ensure that is to start the job of fixing the planet. SteveBaker (talk) 01:56, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
In many areas of life, I find the concept of a mirror useful, hold it up and see how your ideas and words come back. Lets try it now: you, SteveBaker have been selected as a renewable resource, you and your children will be the ones living beside the dump leaking toxic chemicals, but when you and your family are dead, we'll add to your gravestones "took one for the team". Similarly, the ex-residents of Pripyat may or may not be happy about the vigour of life around Chernobyl, but I bet they'd like to get their stuff back. (Have you checked out any of this stuff? It's fascinating.) And to extend your concept a little further, what would really help would be to take out 3 billion or so people, it would simplify things immensely. The only problem is which ones: the poorest? the richest? the lawyers? darkest-skinned? highest carbon users? a "take one for the planet" lottery?
And I'm all for starting to try to fix the planet, I started trying about 30 years ago by taking personal responsibility, small cars, switch-off and unplug, recycle, avoid high-processed foods, don't buy jet-skis - live a simple life where possible. Three years ago I bought the most fuel-efficient gasoline car I could find, 2-door, no options. That is the big problem, persuading people they need to take personal responsibility in a multitude of ways - but many people really don't like to actually think about what they're doing, they much prefer to just do whatever is convenient. And yeah, Clean Coal(TM) plays right into that, it means someone else is dealing with the problem. And really, so does the idea that we can bury the waste in Yucca Mountain, we studied this for 20 years and we can say for sure it's good for the next 100,000? And vitrified no less, so that whether we shortly or others in the far future want to do something with it, we'll face a massive energy barrier just to get it back out of the glass. The planet does indeed have a problem with (overpopulation and) short-term solutions. Franamax (talk) 03:42, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) The Elena Filatova "gamma girl" stuff has long ago been shown to be a hoax. But the point you make about "what if it's me that's suffing mercury toxicity" is of course valid - as an individual, you need to fight to stop these things from happening to you and your family. But from the perspective of "big policy" - we're better off as a species losing a few individuals to mercury toxicity than (say) wiping out the polar bears. We should lower car safety standards in order to let us build lighter and more fuel efficient vehicles. We need to take the increased risk of using nuclear power in order to keep global warming at bay. This dichotomy is why we need professionals to take those tough decisions for us. Politicians do this kind of thing all the time when we fight wars. Medical researchers do this when they do placebo-controlled studies of drugs that are known to be helpful - harm is done to half of their test subjects in order to be more helpful to the greater numbers. This is really no different.

How we pick who gets to suffer and who to survive is indeed an ugly process. Property prices near waste dumps are lower than houses in pristine woodland with lakeside views...so people who can't afford the economic cost to avoid problems will suffer. I don't like it - but it's kinda inevitable.

The way to aggressively reduce the population is the way the Chinese did it - one child per family - no exceptions except perhaps when a child dies before puberty. The population halves at each generation. After 10 generations the population drops by a factor of 1,000 and then we're down from billions of people to mere millions - and at that point, we could all drive SUV's and use personal jets to get from A to B and live in acres of virgin forest with private lakes because at that scale, the earth would hardly notice our worst excesses. We'd never run out of fossil fuels - and we'd be almost incapable of causing any kind of greenhouse effect, we couldn't overfish the oceans or chop down unacceptable amounts of rainforest. Poor productivity of farmland in places like Africa would no longer be a problem - starvation should vanish within just a few generations. Water conservation would be a non-problem. The world would be a much more comfortable place.

I only have one child - I regard that decision as being as important as recycling, driving a small, efficient car, living close to work or having a properly insulated house with LED lighting. One child is plenty - each child gets more of their parent's time and educational standards rise.

There are some tough problems to deal with though - because our social system pays for retirement and health care for seniors by taxing the young. When the population halves, each person in the younger generation has to earn enough to pay for TWO old people. That's tough to handle - and a continually growing population is much easier to deal with. Also, it requires that all governments enact such laws - I can imagine the sheer white-knuckle panic of many white Americans to the idea of being out-bred by the peoples of South and Central America. Things will have to get a LOT worse before governments would be prepared to put these draconian measures in place.

With only 1/1000th the number of scientists - the pace of technological change would slow dramatically - but since we're still on an exponential growth path, slowing things down by that much might not be so terrible.

We'd have 1/1000th the number of great artists, writers and musicians - but how many of us are familiar with more than 0.1% of the world's great works? No many. We'd still have the Internet - we would be essentially 100% interconnected - there would be so many ways to see and appreciate art and music from vastly more people - I think we'd cope just fine.

Some of the more menial tasks that humans do would require an even smaller proportion of people than it does now. When you reduce the height of a pyramid, you remove a greater percentage of blocks from the bottom than you do from the top. Human society is like a pyramid so it follows that a smaller percentage of people would have to do mindless jobs and more of us (proportionately) would live more fulfilling lives.

There are some things - the most major of human undertakings - that would become insanely difficult. Sending a man to the moon for example would take more resources than the entire population of the planet could undertake in a single generation.

When you look at things like wars - they benefit greatly from smaller populations. Instead of armies consisting of 100's of thousands of people - they'd consist of 100's of people - the chain of command is short. The entire army of a major nation would fit into one decent sized cargo plane. For wars to break out on any scale would require the entire population of a typical nation to fight in person - I think people's taste for that kind of thing would scale back dramatically once we're not fighting for resources or land anymore. Decentralizing our cities would reduce the ability of a lone nut-job to do significant damage too. A 9/11 style attack would probably only kill a mere handful of people - it would take a nuclear weapon to take out an entire city to do that much damage.

After ten generations we could moderate our policies to keep the population at 'maintenance' levels - two to three children per family would work just fine.

The endpoint would be as close to paradise as is easily imaginable - nobody could deny that this would be a vastly better situation than we're in now...but getting there from here requires some DRASTIC action...and I don't see it happening.

SteveBaker (talk) 04:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree neat stuff. Another technical note regarding nuclear power. First let me disclose my personal opinions. I think nuclear power is about as good an idea as communism they both came from around the 30's and they both look good on paper. The US has worked with nuclear material in an open loop style lately. Stuff is mined, processed, goes through the reactor once, and its spent and should eventually be buried. This creates more waste then a closed loop where material is recycled in a nuclear fuel cycle. I don't know the details exactly but there was an accident or misplace material involving fuel recycling and the whole process got legally shut down in the US. Sorry for the poor detail but this information was provided in a oral presentation a number of months back. The legal shut down eventual lapsed without being renewed but the private sector in the US isn't willing to start the process up again (its really expensive to start) until they are confident that they won't be shut down before they get their returns. Other issues with recycling is that it produces weapons grade material. Thats why every nut job wants nuclear power plants, a major waste product is weapons grade 239Pu. I would also like to make a side point about the economics of nuclear power. The cost of nuclear power is heavily subsidized by the government since they take responsibility for the waste, insuring the entire process, and most of the research involved with the technology. These sort of subsides and hidden savings are tied into most conventional power production. For example the mortgages on most coal power plants were paid off long ago meaning the cost of coal electricity ~0.03$ kWr generally doesn't include construction costs. The cost of electricity from a new wind or new solar system isn't generally compared to the cost of electricity from a new coal plant. Even when one time costs are factored into the cost of coal they are usually based on the costs from 50 years ago not adjusted for inflation. Not to mention coal depends on water, a commodity that is generally used to capacity in much of the US. Utility companies want to invest in financially safe systems (very long term). For a long time nuclear power has been a liability to accountants but that has changed. Most new capacity over the last 20 or so years has been added in the form of natural gas turbines but we don't have as much as natural gas as we thought and so it getting expensive and is no longer a truly safe investment. Utilities don't know if coal will soon become a liability socially and legally so they are hesitance to sign the 30 year mortgage on new plants. The gap between conventional and alternative is closing. Its likely that T. Boone Pickens farm is just the first step, a tipping point. I'll stop before I start talking about our out dated transmission system of water and electricity and the question of if they have been crippled by regulators preventing them from passing the true costs (need for upgrades) onto the consumers.--OMCV (talk) 22:03, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
Nuclear power is tricky - and when we first started messing with it in the 1960's, we did a pretty terrible job of it. There were two major problems:
  1. Reliability. When they failed: Very Bad Things happened. But we have amazingly powerful computers now - and reactor designs that are much safer-by-design. We can instrument the heck out of the power station - automate the heck out of it and make it vastly safer.
  2. Low level radioactive waste. The high level waste can (at least theoretically) be recycled as fuel - but the low level waste simply isn't worth the effort to reclaim - and that's a problem. But compare to a coal fired power station...did you know that the ash from a coal fired power station is actually pretty radioactive? From our article Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation: "The release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels in nuclear generating plants.".
Clearly we need fusion technology - but it could be a hundred years before we get that right and we simply can't wait that long to get rid of coal fired generators. Wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, biomass and all of those other things don't contribute enough to cover our needs - even with a credible level of economizing. So we're going to be stuck with fission no matter what.
SteveBaker (talk) 02:09, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Did you know...

That you're named in a draft legal threat at Talk:Water-fuelled car#Copyright infringement? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:04, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Wow! That's kinda overkill! I was just following the guidelines for dealing with this. SteveBaker (talk) 01:45, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
Best regards Steve, and sorry if my draft seemed pre-emptive. (I wanted to ask you this yesterday but then I noticed a few things on your user page, down bellow, which I felt I needed to give a response) Could you please tell me to whom you sent out an email regarding the copyright issue of the article Water-fuelled car? I think we should give them the weekend to formulate a response, but prior too doing this, I just wanted to confirm we sent out an email to the correct people. --CyclePat (talk) 17:20, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
I sent it to the two addresses listed on their "Contact Us" page - I'm kinda busy at work right now - I'll get you exact addresses tonight. It's about time I sent out the "reminder" email anyway. SteveBaker (talk) 18:08, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell

Regarding your comments on Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell: Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that continued personal attacks will lead to blocks for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stanley_Meyer%27s_water_fuel_cell&diff=230509922&oldid=230493486

Sorry - I fail to see how a completely accurate complaint about a user violating WP:3RR could be considered a personal attack. How else are you supposed to inform someone that they are breaking the rules? Please substantiate your complaint or remove this template and apologize. Thanks! SteveBaker (talk) 04:17, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
This is what the templates are for. If you disagree with him, leave a message, or a template, on his talk page. Your edit summary "GDewilde - you are all ready well past the WP:3RR limit - please stop doing this or you'll get blocked for disruptive editing." is a clear personal attack. Constructive criticism is good, but not on an edit summary. Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy for details and how you can avoid this in the future. Remember to comment on content, not on contributors. DougsTech (talk) 04:25, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
I did leave a template on his talk page - with a polite explanatory message. I've read WP:NPA from cover to cover - there is nothing whatever in there that supports what you are saying. In fact, WP:NPA explicitly states:
Personal attacks do not include civil language used to describe an editor's actions, and when made without involving their personal character, should not be construed as personal attacks
I left the note in my edit summary as a courtesy to GDewilde - to let him know that he's overrun the limit and that he shouldn't mindlessly hit revert again. I'm pointing out Wikipedia's guidelines about 3RR and the possible consequences of ignoring it. By any standard, that is civil language describing an editor's actions - far from being banned by WP:NPA, it's specifically listed as not being an NPA violation! That's about as far from confirming what you claim as is possible!! There is no indication whatever in WP:NPA that making a remark on an edit summary versus someplace else is to be treated any differently.
So, you are WRONG - per WP:NPA - please apologize for the unwarranted accusation and remove this template from my talk page. SteveBaker (talk) 04:47, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Fine. I'm not going to argue with you, and Assume good faith. However, you violated the 3RR with the edit in question. That was currently your 4th edit in 24hrs. It also appears that you may be in an Edit War with the other user. I stand behind my warnings, and I will not take them down. DougsTech (talk) 05:16, 8 August 2008 (UTC)


Oh geez - please actually read these guidelines you're tossing around! It's just wrong to start accusing people of violating rules when you don't actually understand the rules yourself. It's three REVERTS in 24 hours - not three EDITS. If I may quote from WP:3RR:
  • An editor must not perform more than three reverts, in whole or in part, on a single page within a 24-hour period. A revert means undoing the actions of another editor, whether involving the same or different material each time.
My first edit of that 24 hour period was a simple edit - clearly not a revert. I changed the word "main" to "see also". That was not undoing the actions of another editor. I would perhaps argue that the second edit wasn't a revert either - but that's more debatable so I won't argue it. Either way, one edit and three reverts is just fine. I broke no rules. Please stop accusing me of things I havn't done. I'm entirely innocent in this matter and you're just tossing accusations around like so much candy.
Accusing people (especially well-established and respected editors) of breaching Wikipedia rules is not a nice thing to do. You need to be VERY sure of your position before you do that. That includes re-checking the guidelines you think have been violated. So - once again: Please apologize, remove the template that you incorrectly placed on my talk page. I'm happy to forget your misunderstanding of the 3 revert rule because it's an easy mistake to make.
SteveBaker (talk) 05:40, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
(Commenting as a lurker who's had this talk page on my watchlist for some time. And presuming, of course, that "discussion" is always welcome.)
In looking over the edits, the facts would seem to support SteveBaker's comments above.
And further, I would have to agree that for someone who seems to be so involved in vandal patrol (in just looking over your (DougsTech) user page), I find it concerning the apparent lack of understanding of the guidelines and policies involved.
The most basic being that templates are placed as a convenience to the placer (Saves you time from having to come up with unique text on every occasion.)
They're not intended as a substitute for discussion. Nor is the use of a template warning required. (An editor is welcome to leave a notice of their choosing, preuming civility and accuracy.)
If you would like any further clarification, please feel free to ask. - jc37 05:55, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
This user seems to make a lot of people mad, regardless. Unless SteveBaker agrees that he is wrong, and that he should apologize to GDewilde for the personal attack, and to me also, its a useless discussion. I would not suggest conversation with this user. I am not going to recall anything from this page. If you don't want to be helped, I wont bother. GDewilde is the only victim of the attacks. I can only predict administrative action in the future to stop the violations. A well-established and respected editor editor like myself that only tries to help can only see this as a minor problem, that will hopefully be taken care of. Don't expect me to apologize, that won't happen in a million years. You, SteveBaker, are the one who should apologize. You seem to expect others to agree with you, and do as you say, I am afraid that is not how it works. I am not looking at this page again, unless he changes his position on his violations. DougsTech (talk) 06:41, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
(responding to your comments above and below, to try to reduce threading confusion.)
First, as for "administrative action", feel free to check out my user page. And further, I'll be happy to place this on WP:AN to get more WP:3PO.
There are a couple places in which you're clearly incorrect. The main is confusing how editors may discuss. "Comment on content, not on the contributor." Is accurate. But that doesn't mean that one cannot comment on a contributor's actions. And that's where you're confused. If that weren't true, then wouldn't you be violating that same clause here on this talk page? Why yes you would.
I personally don't care if you apologise. I think it would show that you're a better Wikipedian than you're showing now, but the world won't end if you refuse, drama queen-like. Proof? - "I am not looking at this page again, unless he changes his position on his violations" - And I'm also wondering how you'll know if you never look here again...
So no, I'm not thrilled with how you are currently acting. And I now have concerns that: if this is how you're treating an (in my experience: a typically calm) editor like Steve, how you may be acting when dealing with new editors who are as yet unused to Wikipedia. (And I'm still deciding which action I should appropriately take regarding this...)
Anyway, I hope (to use your words) that "I made it a tad bit easier for you to understand". - jc37 21:53, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Since you seem to question my understanding of policies, what does no personal attacks policy state right at the top? Let me put it here because I doubt you will go read it. "Comment on content, not on the contributor." What did you do? Well let me put that here again too - "GDewilde - you are all ready well past the WP:3RR limit - please stop doing this or you'll get blocked for disruptive editing." Now, how much of that comment was about the article? Do you see anything in that comment that may be a *wee bit* about a contributor? That's right! There is NOTHING about the content, only about the contributor. I am glad we have come to a good conclusion that you were WRONG in your violation of the no personal attacks policy. Then, you were WRONG in trying defending yourself. Hop I made it a tad bit easier for you to understand :) DougsTech (talk) 06:52, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
Please scroll up a bit - and re-read the word-for-word quote from WP:NPA and the word-for-word quote from WP:3RR. It says that I'm allowed comment on an editors actions in civil language - that's precisely what I did. You are telling me that it's not OK to explain Wikipedia guidelines - because that's all I did. That's SPECIFICALLY called out in WP:NPA as not being a personal attack: NOT - is there some ambiguity in the meaning of that little word? Then you accuse me of breaking the 3RR rule when it SPECIFICALLY says that only reverts are counted. You flat out don't understand the guidelines - that's OK - nobody knows them all. But now that they've been pointed out to you - it's time to gracefully bow out and admit that you screwed up. It's that time right now...three...two...one...NOW! SteveBaker (talk) 11:07, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
(Here`s an outside comment; I hope you take this as a compliment) Just because a user gets mad doesn`t mean he`s wrong. Inversedly, just because a user gets mad doesn`t mean he`s right either. Indeed, with the interesting debates we`ve had, I always find myself feeling one step behind or inferior compared to Steve. Steve`s a smart man and if you listened to him, I`m sure you could learn a few things... I know I have. Steve does have a way of saying things sometimes but, I must concede we`ve had some pretty interesting and intelligible debates... To which I`ve conceded a few (if not all). Actually, probably most of them. But of course, we have our differences and sometimes I know Steve gets frustrated... it`s understandable, because, I`m asking for reference for something he clearly understands... something which is obvious. I too would get frustrated... but, that`s what Wikipedia is all about. You write something, someone else reverts it... if you had a reference, there would be less chances of that happening. But then again, sometimes you`re *(I sometimes) just missing the reference because you read to fast. Anyways... everyone makes mystakes. Might I suggest, a little empathy and forgiveness. Even I get mad... but I don`t think, it's a mad at Steve because of what he does... I think it's a mad at Steve because I want to blame somebody for my lack of ability to properly communicate my ideas. In reality I should only be mad at myself for my lack of compatency to verbalize whatever the issue is in a clear, concise manner. I find, despite the odd smirky comment such as `FIND IT YOURSELF` (which appears to contradict policy), that being able to concede is also quite an important part of Wikipedia and Life general. p.s.: Thank you again for your patience and continued efforts. I hope we can keep working together on the water fuelled car articles. --CyclePat (talk) 09:03, 8 August 2008 (UTC)


I just want to lend my support to Steve here.
1) the user in question has been banned, blocked, generally edits in a manner that is disruptive.
2) I agree with Steve's read of the personal attack policy, and agree he did not violate it in the text you've cited. Guyonthesubway (talk) 14:27, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
I have to question my own reading ability here: the issue is an edit summary of "GDewilde - you are all ready well past the WP:3RR limit - please stop doing this or you'll get blocked for disruptive editing"? Presumably the 3RR limit had indeed been breached? If so, to construe that as a personal attack is just laughable. Try friendly warning, but I don't see any attack there. What am I missing?
I do assume though that everyone knows that 3RR is the "bright line" rule, four reverts in a 24-hour period is the no-go line - but you can (and probably should) be blocked for edit-warring before that. 3RR conveys no immunity, it's just the very-last straw in edit warring.
Nevertheless, no way is a 3RR warning a personal attack - it's more like saying "buddy, if we keep fighting here, we're gonna fall off that cliff - lets move inland a bit and punch some more". I call no foul (just my opinion). Franamax (talk) 07:14, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
Precisely. When you spot someone crossing the 3RR boundary - the friendly thing to do is to do the very best you can to let them know that in order that they don't cross the 4RR theshold. I dropped a note on his talk page - but in the heat of editing, it would be easy for him to hit the revert button one more time without realising. Putting that warning in my edit summary increased the probability that GDewilde would see it before getting himself in even deeper trouble. SteveBaker (talk) 20:24, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

I also support Steve and I should mention I also support CyclePat (who I often disagree with). But GDewilde has exceeded assumptions and is well beyond good faith. He will be a problem as long as he is on Wikipedia. He is trying to stay just within the rules and abusing the faith of others.--OMCV (talk) 14:56, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Steve are you sure we need all those people to talk? I see you have been on wikipedia a long time, I understand how you feel about the new rules that limit contributions to cited material. In stead of complain about me actually contributing things you should do a few web searches and find a few good sources to cite. There are plenty.
But I think the reader of Stanley Meyer's article wants to know exactly what a water capacitor is and we can "get away" with explaining that. The Z machine uses them for example:
The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratory.
.......This temperature, which enables a 10% to 15% efficiency in converting electrical energy to soft x-rays, was much higher than anticipated (3 to 4 times the kinetic energy of the incoming wires on axis). Thus far, it is currently the highest man-made temperature ever achieved according to The Guinness Book Of Records. The origin of this extra energy still remains unexplained, but it has been theorized that small-scale MHD turbulence and viscous damping would convert magnetic energy into thermal energy of the ions, which then would transfer their energy to the electrons through collisions.
It's just a thought... Gdewilde (talk) 03:41, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
OK. I guess we have to deal with more POV relating to your inexplicable interest in everything-Meyers. We don't have an article about Stanley Meyer - he isn't notable enough to warrant one. The article you're talking about is actually Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell - which only just barely makes the cut. It has his name in the title only because it would be horribly confusing to use his screwed up terminology and just call the article "Water fuel cell" (which is now a DAB page).
The "Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell" article should not spiral off into talking about all the other ridiculous things that Meyer said - he had an awful lot of ridiculous ideas. Discussion of Meyer's ideas about water capacitors and laser-excited-whatever is not appropriate there - and is not notable enough to go elsewhere. Real-world water capacitors are extremely specialised items for niche applications - but just as Meyers had no idea what a "fuel cell" is - he had no clue what a "water capacitor" is either. His writings on the topic are just garbled-up scientific terminology - they don't MEAN anything. But what he meant by a "water capacitor" is utterly different from a conventional capacitor with water as the dialectric. As I explain before, true water capacitors are called "Leyden jars" - and they've been known since the time of Benjamin Franklin - and they've been obsolete for at least 100 years. So:
  • There is no reason to mention Meyer's bizarro-world water capacitors in Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell because it's an unrelated "invention".
  • A thoeretical future article about real "Water capacitors" wouldn't mention Meyer's device either because that's a totally unrelated (and as usual: misnamed) concept. I think our article on the Leyden jar has the water capacitor issue well-covered anyway.
  • An article about "Stanley Meyer's water capacitor" would be an AfD waiting to happen because it's a totally non-notable fringe theory thing...and we don't keep articles about those.
So - we don't need anything about Meyer's water capacitor ANYWHERE in the encyclopedia. If you feel like writing about this crap, take it to one of the free-energy-nut Wiki's - where you'll be made very happy and be allowed (and even encouraged) to write about any of this stuff without being hassled by people who know enough science to tell you it's not true.
I don't know what's got you off on the tangent of talking about the Z machine. The big tank of very pure water you see in that awesome picture above is simply there for insulation purposes. VERY pure water is an exceedingly good insulator. They aren't using it as a capacitor.
20:24, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Interesting

Just a side note on some interesting info I found.

There is a man in New Jersey who lives off the grid with solar panels. When his battery bank is fully charged, he routes the excess to an electrolyzer. The hydrogen is stored in big propane type tanks for use in a conventional fuel cell on cloudy days to keep his batteries charged. The oxygen is vented to the atmosphere. I thought that it was a more efficient way to utilize electrolysis than running an ICE and deserves a better look.

On the personal side...Thanks for your patience on previous discussions. If I could give a barnstar it would be the "Eagle Eye" for noticing and calculating the output of Stanley Meyer's "Fuel Cell" It may be OR, but definitely worth the time and is a prime example of the caliber of work that you bring to this project.I55ere (talk) 16:16, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah - that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The only downside is that if you're going to use an old propane tank, you need to compress the hydrogen in order to store a reasonable amount of the stuff - there are two ways to do that - one is to run the electrolysis cell at high pressure - but that reduces the efficiency of the process - another is to build some kind of a pump to do the compression - and that uses energy also. But since the excess energy from the solar panel would simply go to waste otherwise - you may not care. Another problem is that hydrogen can creep into microscopic cracks in metal and can make it gradually become brittle (via some mechanism that I have to confess to not understanding). If I were pumping a tank up to high pressure with hydrogen, I'd worry about that.
A better way to store hydrogen is in metal hydride granules. As I understand it, you can do that at relatively low pressures. That's the way that hydrogen powered cars are heading these days.
The calculations I've done on the Meyer's fuel cell is indeed OR - but OR is only disallowed in material we write into the various articles. Doing math in order to evaluate the believability of material we might or might not want to put into the article is a necessary part of doing business. Editors do provide creative input in the process of writing articles - and the better informed they are of the facts, the better the encyclopedia will be.
It's very frustrating not to be able to put these elementary calculations into the encyclopedia - you'd think that if the equations being used could be sourced - and the data you're plugging into them could be sourced - then there is no problem...but sadly, I don't think that's true.
Thanks for your kind words. SteveBaker (talk) 16:53, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
I do understand, Paul Pantone spend his whole life in one trial after another then I tried to source the more recent part of the court cases and I came to a total of about zero good sources. After literally hundreds of court hearings, weird convictions, cease and desist orders I cant even source a single hearing. But they all really happened you know?
Here is a good source: http://www.geetfriends.net/netdocs/santa_pantone.mp3 ROFL
I think we can find good sources describing the dielectric properties of water used in a capacitor?
Gdewilde (talk) 03:49, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
Dielectric constant is an old-fashioned concept and it's definition is a bit fuzzy. The modern term is Relative static permittivity (RSP). Our article says that the RSP of water varies between 88 and 34 depending on temperature, and it uses this article is a reference. That took me about 30 seconds of research...why is that so hard? But water is a terrible dialectric for a capacitor because it's a polar molecule and instead of storing charge (which is generally what you want a capacitor to do), it electrolyses and eats up the charge instead of storing it. You'd need to use exceedingly pure water to do a decent job. Incidentally - another name for a water capacitor is a Leyden jar - and they have been obsolete for about a hundred years precisely because there are much better dielectrics. These days we use either ceramics or polymers that have much more predictable/controllable parameters.
SteveBaker (talk) 19:53, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

COI

I strongly recommend that you refrain from reverting clearly NPOV edits. Regarding my most recent edits it is your obligation to resolve this by posting an inquiry on the COI noticeboard. Pending the outcome of the COI inquiry we should avoid edit warring. Noah Seidman (talk) 04:46, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest PARANOIA

This is nonsense Steve[3], the section is unsourced and full of BS[[4]]. I have added lots of citation need tags to the section and now I'm going to make the wild suggestion we find sources for it. Burning oxyhydrogen in the engine has oxygen as it's exhaust product. This means there is additional oxygen available for the conventional combustion. There is no doubt this makes for a cleaner burn.

Engineers have known for years that adding hydrogen to fuel makes an engine run cleaner. "The trick was figuring out how to produce hydrogen quickly and compactly on board" Daniel Cohn states.[1]

MIT's microplasmatron is a fuel converter used on a vehicle to transform gasoline or other hydrocarbons with an electrically conducting plasma to accelerate reactions that generate hydrogen rich gas to be used in the engine.[2]

For example US Patent 1,630,048 claims: "The light and therefore easily inflammable hydrocarbons are first by the ignition means provided on the engine and thus provide the heat required for igniting the heavy hydrocarbons contained in the mixture."[3].

There wouldn't be a point to this if the oxygen didn't help. Could you please return to assuming good faith now? I see you like to Troll topics and users (yes troll is the correct word for it) related to hydrogen combustion and your extreme POV pushing is totally unworkable uncivil and down right aggressive. Your persistent negative opinion peaces are not not more valuable as the lives of people who work in the sector.

The people you are hurting by persistently slandering them. Like this. Here you clearly removed the most important part of the citation. The fact the witnesses say the device worked for hours. At no stage is there any sensible discussion about this.

Now the section Nseidm1 removed which you are complaining about here has LOADS of totally BOLLOCKS claims and no sources at all. Your smear campaign should stop here. Before I hear another word from you about other users I would like for you to example what justification you have for changing a citation and making it appear as if something totally different happened.[[5]]

You change the citation, warn me in the edit summary for your edit then you template my user page for it.[[6]] At no stage did you have anything to justify changing the citation. The facts are that if the citation is no good then the whole thing goes. At no stage is it justified to change peoples publications.

You attack a user asking you to user the summary the correct way.[[7]]

  • you change the citation,
  • you warn me as your description,
  • you template my user page,

Then when asked about it you get furious? You attack this new users for complaining about your smear campaign.[[8]] A a neutral outside source you should value his contribution and by WP:DICK ask yourself if you perhaps might not really be a dick at the moment. I noticed it long ago but I didn't see a need to complaint. Perhaps I'm being a dick myself you see? But that is clearly not the case.

You are attacking a whole industry in that section, you are going to need sources for this smear campaign. I'm going to try to look up sources for those weird claims that you wanted on the article. I seriously doubt I will find anything to back up the pseudoskepticim. Seems to be the main source on the topic[[9]]. I don't think you can use that. Why cant you do it yourself? Was there even one nice word from you on this page:talk:genepax?

Assume good faith Steve, ok?

Nseidm does not work here but this is something he is suppose to do for fun in his spare time. You are definitely destroying that here. You created a topic on the talk page remember? It took me 30 min to respond to your talk page comment. But you was already crying wolf on the other talk page.

I'm not going to report you or anything because there is no fun in that for me.

It's just that you seem awfully confused about things.

Feel free to remove this after reading it.

Gdewilde (talk) 04:58, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

  1. ^ Discoverymagazine MIT Plasmatron
  2. ^ MIT Plasmatron
  3. ^ US 1630048 

Welcome back!

Welcome back our friend!  :) -hydnjo talk 00:52, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, a Japanese railway station
I'm having a particularly boring evening. Nobody is writing anything nasty in any of the articles on my watchlist and I got bored with hitting "Random article" and getting articles about musicians I've never heard of (and am NEVER likely to hear from) and Japanese railway stations. So, in desperation, I hit the RD. SteveBaker (talk) 01:13, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
Well lucky us, I guess. ;-) Lots of us, I'm sure, hope that you stick around the RD! BTW, have you considered joining the gang at this project? Lots of railway station input needed. -hydnjo talk 02:22, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
The quality of the photography really helps!
Oh no - that could only lead to this project. Scroll down to where it says: "The following are some of the newest articles about trains in Japan on Wikipedia for the month of August."...followed by about 60 articles! Sixty articles per month?!? Oh - wait - we're only halfway into August and this is only "some" of the newest articles!! Some fanatic is writing hundreds - perhaps thousands of beautiful articles about Japanese railway stations...and the horrible irony - is nobody is ever going to read them! SteveBaker (talk) 02:40, 15 August 2008 (UTC)


Welcome back indeed

The Boomerang Barnstar.

SteveBaker, for a welcome return after a long absence I present to you this custom barnstar. Cheers! --Sean 14:06, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll second that - we've missed your wit and wisdom. There has been some but not like yours  ;-)) Richard Avery (talk) 15:23, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
The science desk should throw a welcome back party. APL (talk) 15:30, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I knew you'd be back! And I'm glad! --98.217.8.46 (talk) 20:45, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Refdesk

We should have a new motto "The Reference Desks - more interesting than a random Japanese railway station!" I'm sure that would get people flocking in. Anyway - having only just gone back there myself, it's good to see you there, I always learn a lot from you. DuncanHill (talk) 15:32, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I thank everyone for their kind words - I had to forceably give up on the RD because it was seriously eating into my time - to the extent of affecting my work. That was a year ago. Right now, I'm between jobs (see Midway_Games#Studios - under "Midway Studios - Austin Inc" - it was only 85 people, but I was one of them). So I'm contributing to the RD for the entirely selfish reason that I'm VERY, VERY, BORED. But when I'm gainfully employed again (hopefully not too far off) I'll have to cut back sharply on my contributions and maybe go back into hiding again! SteveBaker (talk) 15:38, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
Yes, welcome back indeed =). Acceptable (talk) 20:40, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Duncan Hill is back! Steve Baker is back! Hurray! I missed you both. Dare I hope that others will return? Perhaps even the Muse herself? --Eriastrum (talk) 00:14, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Your responses on the Science RD

Steve - just a polite note to let you know that I am disappointed and somewhat offended by the tone of your recent responses to my contributions on the Science RD. Even if you have strongly held views and disagree with what I say, it is still possible to make your points without sarcasm and without belittling me. May I suggest you reconsider your tone in the light of WP:CIVIL and with due consideration for the example that you are setting to other RD contributors ? Thank you. Gandalf61 (talk) 21:18, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh. Sorry - I truly didn't mean to offend - or be sarcastic. It's very hard to judge that kind of thing in the written word...but no incivility was intended. Just a bunch of guys talking about a subject that interests them. I get corrected frequently - but it's important not to assume a particular tone when it may not be there. SteveBaker (talk) 01:31, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

May be of interest

Hi Steve. You may have interest in this company. They mention use of hydrogen fuel injection using electrolysis.

http://www.ronnmotors.com

Regards Noah Seidman 00:09, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

It seems much like all of the others - is there any special reason I should care about this one? SteveBaker (talk) 05:01, 22 August 2008 (UTC)


Body Language

I am not sure if your question about why "normals" use body language was a real one. If it was real, I have some thoughts to offer. I did teach it to negotiators, both the reading of it and the ways in which to emphasize it. I am not an academic with any credentials, however. If you are interested, I will comment further. I will not be in any way upset if you say that you meant the question to be rhetorical. (Oh yes, and I, too, am very pleased to see your name back at the Ref Desk.) ៛ Bielle (talk) 01:01, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well - it's a bit of both really. I learned how to interpret some basic body language when I attended therapy for my Aspergers Syndrome. They also teach how to fake it - also the whole eye-contact thing (which is the toughest one for me to do because maintaining eye contact is uncomfortable for me). This is all very interesting stuff - but to someone who was born without the 'innate' ability to do those things, the whole business seems incredibly messy. It's pretty obvious how it comes about - most animals use body language because they don't have a spoken one - and it's clear that humans have not lost that trait. Dogs that are brought up with humans - never interacting with other dogs - all know how to use and decode tail wagging and the "play bow". They can't have learned it from us - so it must be a genetic trait. It follows that it's very likely that humans have body language hard-coded in their DNA also...although I evidently didn't!
What kinda bothers me is that body language in humans isn't happening at the conscious level. Hardly anyone realises that in a meeting of a handful of people sitting around a conference table, you can tell who is agreeing with the person who is talking by seeing who has their arms folded the same way as him/her - that leaning back means "I dislike what you're saying" and folding your arms it a defensive thing. If most people don't know that - but they do it anyway - then it's not a conscious act. This was not initially obvious to me - because for me, it is a conscious act - and if I have too many other things occupying my thoughts, I don't always remember to do it.
So if we don't know that we're doing it - and we don't consciously realise that we're decoding it - how do the people who study these phenomena know that they are catching everything? Perhaps there are all sorts of significant signals being passed around from subconscious-mind-to-subconscious-mind communication in this sneaky way! Perhaps the reason I still can't reliably tell when someone is kidding me along is because I'm missing some really subtle signal.
My son is also an aspie - and he and I have decided to make up our own body language. For example, placing one hand on the back of your neck like you're rubbing it and subtly moving your now protruding elbow up or down is a message between us that means "I think someone is making fun of you/me/us". The choice of which elbow to use indicates the direction in which the offender is sitting relative to the signaller.
It's always interesting to hear other people's take on the "library" of gestures that are out there "in the wild". I was watching a documentary some years ago that said that the seemingly-universal nod-of-head-means-"Yes"/shake-of-head-means-"No" gestures are not in fact universal. Oddly - that's not a gesture I've ever had trouble with - even before I learned I was an Aspie and did the course, I knew what that meant. But now I find that in some cultures the two signals have opposite meanings and that a third motion (the rolling of the head from side-to-side) is a third gesture that can mean something in some societies. That's odd because that means it can't be genetic like the arm-folding thing...which means it's taught - and that explains how come I know about it and presumably how come we do it and decode it consciously.
It's an endlessly fascinating topic - and I often wonder just how weird it would be if my body went off sending out these signals - moving my arms around and who-knows-what-else without "me" (my conscious mind) screening them for appropriateness first! It seems incredible to me that you normal people don't realize that all this weird stuff is going on without you deciding to do it! But it's evidently true because now I can see it happening just like in the book. Why isn't there some weird conflict between unconsciously wanting to look all defensive with folded arms at the subconscious level - while your conscious mind is saying "I need to write something down now - can I please have the use of my right arm?". How can these "resource usage" conflicts be going on without you guys noticing it?
I suppose it's like my breathing happens subconsciously - but my conscious mind can overrule that when I decide to hold my breath. But I'm really aware that my subconscious is insisting on taking over again before I pass out - is there a similar mechanism that forces you to drop your pen and fold your arms after a while? I guess that if there is, nobody noticed it yet.
This is all SO bizarre (more so because I only found out about the extent of it when I was closing in on 50 years old). It's like being told that you're really living in a world where everyone else but you is a telepathic alien. It's downright creepy! Just how much do you guys tell each other that I'm missing?
It's no wonder you "normal" guys can't sit still long enough to read thick computer manuals or learn to name all the parts of a 1963 Mini Cooper! You're too busy flapping your arms around sending sneaky telepathic messages to each other! (I'm kidding - of course)
SteveBaker (talk) 02:07, 22 August 2008 (UTC)


I am fascinated by what you write. I wonder if you “send” body language signals of which you are not aware, like the twitches of the small muscles under the eye that give away tension or lies, or the sudden constriction of the pupil of the eye that denotes surprise. There are very few people who can control such reactions, though there are many who can control the grosser gestures and reactions. My wondering arises from the idea that, in order to mimic body language, you first have to have noticed it at some level. In general, we do this mimicking from babyhood. (And that is the “why” of body language, of course: we do it because everyone -or almost everyone- else does it.) Does Asperger’s prevent such noticing?
Body language is like oral language in many ways. For the most part, adults don’t think about every word or every sentence or even, and this is all too obvious in listening to almost anything “live” on TV, every paragraph. We just start talking. Something has obviously happened at an unconscious level, and happened very, very fast, but, unless we come to an idea that needs thinking about, we just keep talking. Somehow, for the most part, the ideas come together into words, sentences and paragraphs. Body language is similar except that only a small percentage of the population (actors, politicians, public speakers, con men, gamblers, etc.) ever stop to consider what it is that their body is saying.
We tend to trust people whose body language is consistent with their words, and mistrust those whose body language is not. The real problem arises because we may be able to read the body language with extreme accuracy, but we cannot be certain of the cause. If I see you in a defensive posture (which, to be read correctly, would involve much more than just the folding of the arms across the chest) I cannot know whether the defensiveness is in reaction to the intent of something I have just said or done, or whether it is a reaction to something else you are thinking about. I may have used a specific word that sent your mind off on a different track, one more important to you, and it is to that track that you are reacting. Untold confusion results if I then react to your defensive body language with aggression or placation, depending upon what I want to achieve.
I sometimes wonder how any two people manage to find enough understanding of each other to get through a conversation without mayhem or madness, and that’s even when they speak the same oral language! The research suggests that we put more reliance on the body language than the words. I met someone in grad school who had almost no body language of the gross sort; even quadriplegics don’t sit as still as she did. I often wondered if she was joking about some things she said, though longer exposure convinced me she also had no sense of humour. She made no friends that year, and every study group complained about her lack of co-operation, even though she did all the work she was supposed to do. That was the beginning of my interest in the language we speak even when we are uttering no words.
Thank you for your response. You have given me much think about. I love the anecdote about the private body language you invented with your son. Most spouses have similar signals for public occasion, and some families develop them. My grandmother used to look at us over her glasses after we had said something unacceptable to her in a public space and say “Thank you, dear”. That meant, in words she may not have known, and certainly would never have used. “Shut the fuck up! It’s all downhill for you from here to home.” ៛ Bielle (talk) 03:10, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I'm unaware of sending any body language that I'm unaware of...hmmm - I guess that doesn't help.
Asperger's is a small step on the way to Autism. As far as we know, Asperger's is a (partial?) failure of the part of the brain that enables you to keep a mental image of the other person's mind. I have no magical clues about whatever it is you might be thinking. I might see your body language - but the part of my brain that would record that information and insert it into my image of your mental state - simply isn't there. Autism takes that further by perhaps not even realising that other people HAVE minds - another person is just like a wall or a car - some kind of inanimate 'thing'.
Having to learn body language and apply it consciously means that there is no reasonable possibility of reproducing it exactly. So you've gotta go with some kind of "shorthand" version of it. Sure there are lots of things you need to do to look "realistically" defensive - but folding your arms and leaning away from the speaker is about the limit of what I'm able to do while still listening to what's being said. Doing those kinds of thing does seem to help other people to deal with me. The trick where you mimic the pose of people you agree with and sit differently to them when you don't like what they are saying is a really neat thing. It's almost cool that I'm doing it deliberately and everyone else is doing it without knowing. At a glance I can tell who is with me and who isn't - I really wish I'd known that 40 years earlier than I did!
The person you met in grad school sounds like a classic Aspie. When I finally realised I had a problem - very late in life - and was properly diagnosed - it was like a bright light was suddenly turned on in my life. I was able to look back on past disasters (somehow most of them involved failures with girls) - and I just cringe when I realize just how badly I screwed up - and how trivially easy it would have been to fix it if only I'd known. Just imagine having sex with someone who hasn't a clue about your mental state...yeah...exactly. Early diagnosis is a really important thing.
One last story...recent...horrifying...heartbreaking: My son (it turns out) is colorblind. Very mildly - the most mild kind possible. We found out because I was forever telling him to switch his Wii game from 'standby' (where the disk keeps spinning and wearing out the motor) to 'off'. There is a single tri-color LED on the front - green for "running", orange for "standby" and red for "off". He complained that he couldn't possibly know what state it was in - so I pointed the LED out to him: "Look - red for off, orange for standby"..."But Daddy - those are almost the exact same color! How could anyone be expected to know?"...at that moment, I made the mental connection that he could just possibly be color-blind. I was suddenly fascinated by the possibility of tracking this down...it was like answering a question on the RefDesk. I looked online for a color blindness test - Oliver tried it and failed in the classical manner - I showed him that I could pass the test - I surfed Wikipedia to get a more accurate answer for what exactly the result meant in terms of human physiology and explained it to Oliver. Then I tried to find the limits of the range of his problem by making some color swatches on the computer and asked him to tell me whether they looked the same or not. I figured out that a piece of red gel taped over the Wii's LED would enhance the difference between orange and red for him...that actually worked...I was elated!
This went on for AGES.
What I'd UTTERLY neglected to do was to reflect his mental state - he was DEVASTATED - he had suddenly been declared handicapped - his entire future life as a budding graphics artist might change - and I (his father for chrissakes) wasn't comforting him or telling him it wasn't that bad or simply hugging him - I was joyously exploring the problem - solving the intellectual puzzle, piling on more proof.
I feel absolutely AWFUL about that...do you have any idea how bad I felt when I stopped and did the little "What might the other person be feeling?" exercise? I'd let him down in the worst possible way. But that's what Asperger's syndrome is all about - a deep fascination with exploring a new topic - a total inability to notice how other people might be feeling.
(Worse still - it turns out - Oliver is also an Aspie, so he couldn't reflect my mental state and realize why I seemed so happy that he was color blind.)
SteveBaker (talk) 04:39, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I continue to be amazed at your ability to solve problems that would overwhelm most people. I think your story about discovering your son’s colour blindness, and the different ways in which you each reacted, ought to be in every handbook for parents.
Does it help to know that large percentage of the people I have met, worked with and/or taught, also give no thought to what others might be thinking or feeling, as they crash through life? As far as I know, Asperger’s is relatively rare, and thus these people have the ability, they have just never considered it important to use. (As an aside, how would your son feel about being identified on Wikipedia and discussed by strangers?) And then, even among those of us who try, we frequently forget, in the midst of an adventure, a search, a project, that not everyone will be delighted with our success or even with our enthusiasm.
If you think of body language the way you might think about blushing, for example (and do you blush?) as something that just happens in certain situations, that often, if not always, is under no conscious control, that advertises an inward state but not the reason for it, you would be closer to understanding how body language works for most of us. If you are successful in your mirroring techniques, then you might be very good at much of what Neuro-Linguistic Programming teaches. I understand that if you practice it often enough, it becomes automatic and does not require much conscious control or “front of mind” room, in just the same way that "normals" use body language. I don't have to analyze the body postures at a table at a conscious level. I have been a negotiator for almost all my life; I just turn towards those who are not in agreement and "entreat" them to join the rest of us, and all without a specific word being uttered. I have watched this on tape so that I know it is true and that it just happens because I know I never gave the actions one single conscious thought. You asked earlier about a mechanism that forces us to "drop our pens and fold our arms". Yes, it does exist. It is not, for most of us, just high drama, or a calculated act, when we throw down our pens, cross our arms hard, and glare across the table. It just happens, though it can be controlled. And why do we do it? Because it works! The body conveys in a very compact form exactly how we feel. It is not subject to advanced vocabulary skills, or any specific experience, and it is difficult, though not impossible, to fake over any length of time. We smile for the same reason, and that is also hard to fake. ៛ Bielle (talk) 06:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I certainly do blush - I don't notice other people blushing though...unless I'm specifically looking for it. I smile naturally too (that's just as well because I know it's almost impossible to fake) - but not always at appropriate times. As you say, normal people broadcast and understand internal state - but not the reason for being in that state. I'm missing the understanding of state because I lack Mirror neurons (or at least there aren't enough of them - or they don't work - or maybe they just found something more interesting to do!) - I don't naturally broadcast my internal state (although some things like blushing and smiling seem to work OK).
When someone throws down their pen, crosses their arms and glares across the table - that's not a subconscious thing. That's a very conscious act - and completely obvious (even to me) at a conscious level. That's not the problem. It's the subtle undercurrents that express an internal state that has not yet reached the level of conscious action that is the problem. When my conversation has turned into a speech and the people around me have heard enough - I simply can't tell. This is really annoying - for them, no doubt - but also for me. I'm trying to have a polite conversation at a party - and I'm boring people to death by explaining the intricate details of TCP/IP switching protocols when they just wanted to know what I do for a living. Trust me - I'd rather not be doing that! Before I learned strategies to cope (like don't put across more than three or four sentences without stopping until the other person says something to encourage me to say more)...I was in a terrible social state. But even knowing this information, it's really tough to be self-monitoring for duration, remembering to keep appropriate amounts of eye contact, mirroring body posture, watching for signs of the other person getting annoyed with me - and at the same time actually saying something interesting! That's hard work!
It's interesting that you mentioned Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). My sister (who lives in the UK - where this stuff seems to be widely accepted) has just signed up to train for that. Since I'd never heard of the subject before (it's evidently not 'big' in Texas yet!) I've been reading about it. It bothers me that it seems awfully pseudo-scientific new-age stuff without any scientific grounding whatever. It claims to have roots in (of all things) computer programming and cybernetics! Well - as it happens, I am one of the VERY few people in the world who has a degree in Cybernetics (from the University of Kent) - and from everything I see in NLP, (I've read "Frogs into Princes" and some of the papers in the Journal of Counseling Psychology that relate to NLP) it has nothing whatever to do with Cybernetics or any relationship to the disciplines of computer programming (which is what I do for a living). From what I read, its claims to have a basis in neurology are vehemently denied by experts in that field - which leaves only psychology as a basis for it's claims (I have no way to know because I know nothing of that field). If at least three of the four planks it's based on are in fact not contributing anything to it's methodology - then it seems to me that it might very well be about as scientific as mood rings and crystal healing! I'm nervous about saying this to my sister because she's getting very excited about getting into the field - but I have a bad feeling about it! I'm going to study it some more...but it's not looking good so far.
SteveBaker (talk) 15:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Psychology is likely a good place for assigning NLP until we -the world community at large- understand more about it. I have the Bandler and Grinder books. (No scientist is likely to be attracted to books entitled The Structure of Magic.) I did try to register for a course, but there was too much "push" at the local office when I went in to make my payment. I withdrew because I was uncomfortable. I have never gone back. I have two friends, one a psychiatrist and the other a psychologist, both with undergraduate degrees in biology, who have proven to their own satisfaction that a number of the actual techniques work, though they also both found that some were too manipulative to be used except with the greatest of care and in a therapeutic session. Neither of them trusted the "science" of NLP, which is quite different from finding the practices, or some of them, useful.
As for your remark that the throwing down of the pen etc, is conscious, I ask you to consider that it is not, or it is no more conscious than the eruption of an angry series of words. If one stops to think, which is what those with "anger management issues" are asked to do, then any gesture or word becomes conscious, but I tell you that many of the gestures you may be thinking of as conscious are not really so. When I roll my eyes heavenward in exasperation, the gesture is started and finished before I have even thought about it unless, and this is important, I have a reason (conscious) not to be so demonstrative. So, as you force yourself to keep track of your own body language and that of others until it is too tiring to do so, most of the so-called "normals" only keep track of what needs to be suppressed, until it is too tiring to do so. If you have ever been in a discussion that, seemingly quite suddenly, and over a small point, exploded into angry words and gestures, you are likely to have been talking to someone who just got tired of holding down his natural response and they burst forth.
These are all gestures over which one, in the usual course, has control: motions of head, hands, eyes, etc. The other group, what the gambling world calls "tells", the tiny, almost impossible to change or control like twitches, colour changes, temperature changes, moisture changes are all entirely unconscious from the initial noticing through to the response. We know about them from detailed observation, and it is possible we are missing some. Smell, for example, is seldom discussed and I think it may be yet another set of coded signals. I also suspect that some of the brain's redundancy is actually busy at this level. ៛ Bielle (talk) 19:51, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Apologies to out-dent, but that was getting tough to read. I'm a long time ref-desk lurker, and I wanted to chime in my cheer at your return (my condolences on the circumstances) but then I saw this exchange, which is absolutely fascinating. I've been chewing on analogizing our common situation as something like listening to a pop song, as a person of pop sensibilities, and having the backbeat completely muted. Some people depend so thoroughly on the "backbeat" that nothing else about the "performance" matters, it's cacophonous and displeasing, period - most are just off-put and try and fill it in "automatically" - and a precious few just dig the different composition. I imagine that the spectrum is a question of more instruments getting muted... but hey, what's red to the blind, anyway? As regards NLP, I suspect that there's a bit of magic (in the sense of the word Penn&Teller, or Derren Brown, might use) with bloat as icing on top to push the concept. There's a lot that's fairly repeatably demonstrable about convincing other people of other things - some study about velveteen ears in Disneyland escapes my recall - but beyond that? Maybe it's like dieting - eat fewer calories, exercise more, and then dress those ideas up with some random claptrap. Be well. 98.169.163.20 (talk) 04:15, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Back to *poke* you again

Sooo... Interested in trying again? - jc37 02:20, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure. It seems to be getting easier for non-admins with sufficiently solid editing history/reputation to call on a passing admin when help is required. I don't know that I want to exchange the freedom of a non-admin to not have to be impartial for the power an admin has to jump in and change things. For example: I've had a lot of run-ins with idiots lately - mostly in Fringe Theory areas. For some reason the people involved with junk science are particularly prone to being ill-behaved and breaking the Wiki-rules. I've had little trouble in bringing them their just desserts without admin privileges. I get the information lined up, make a clean case - and pretty soon an admin jumps in and fixes the problem. If I'd been an admin, I'd have felt an obligation to avoid being on one side in the (inevitable) editing wars in order that I could apply the disciplinary powers without being accused of bias. But I feel I can do more good by providing a solidly scientific counterweight to the free-energy nut-jobs and the people who believe their kids are superhuman because they have "indigo auras". If I'm enforcing rules like "You have a conflict of interest if you're the press officer of the evil-company-from-hell that we're writing about" or "You can't make your username be the URL of your for-profit website"...then I don't think I'd feel comfortable also telling them that their view is not mainstream science and hence they need a higher burden of proof per WP:FRINGE.
It's a good thing my self-nom failed two years ago. I didn't understand the nature of the job and I'd have made a terrible admin back then.
I won't flat-out say no - let me think about it for a few days. I just lost my job last week and I need some time to get my head straightened out before I make a decision like this. (Hmmm - that's more or less what I said last time you asked isn't it? I've only lost my job twice in 35 years - and both times you've wanted to nominate me for adminship immediately afterwards. A suspicious man would wonder whether the recruitment department of the Rouge Cabal is more powerful than previously imagined!)
Once again - thanks for thinking of me - it is an honor to be invited.
SteveBaker (talk) 02:47, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Wow @ coincidence. And here I was just giving you some time since the last time I posted on your talk page (I was going to ask you then, but decided to wait a bit til that situation was at least somewhat resolved.)
If it helps, I doubt I'm anywhere near being part of the "rouge cabal" : )
But humour aside, I understand your hesitance.
If it helps, I'll mention to you what I did explained to Doczilla (who finally was pulled through rfA kicking and screaming : )
Admins are still editors. You can still do all the things you described above. The main thing you would have to be wary of is using the tools in a situation which you are involved in as an editor.
Anyway, I'll leave you to your thoughts : ) - jc37 03:05, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Well, I've slept on it. (Does that help? I never know!)
There are probably only two reasons why I might want adminship - the social status and the tools.
  • I don't need the tools right now. There are plenty of times I've felt that some user should be blocked or an article deleted or locked - but those tend to be occasions where I'm deeply involved in the action surrounding that person/article - and in those cases, use of admin powers would be skating on the edge of abuse - so I'd have to avoid using them in all the cases where they'd actually be useful in day-to-day editing. The times when I could justify using them would be if I were patrolling XfD's or stuff like that - and I don't do that much, it's not a good use of my skills.
  • Wanting adminship for the social status is clearly not a good reason. But as you can tell from my User page - I collect barnstars and I parade the articles I've gotten onto the front page and I put up the little widgets that mostly show that I have editcountitis. This means that I'd probably be in it for the status.
So I don't need adminship but maybe I want it. If it were a simple thing to get and was generally no big deal - I'd say "Sure - it might occasionally be useful to have the admin tools. So go ahead and set the bit in my user account so I have access to them - 'Kthnx.".
But it's not that simple. The "pain to gain" ratio is much worse.
Last night I decided re-read my original self-nom RfA from two years ago. The process was horrible. The comments leveled against me were universally without any merit whatever. Not one of the "Oppose" statements makes any sense whatever. Not writing a long enough intro, not using edit summaries and having a poor ratio of WP: edits to mainspace edits...that was it. Let's look at that:
  • Not writing a long enough intro: Nowhere in the RfA instructions does it tell you that you need to write a lot. The subtext of this comment is "This user hasn't been reading RfA's so he's not one of us". I don't need to read RfA's to be a trustworthy user of some set of tools...that's bogus. If there is a solid requirement for stating something in the RfA then that needs to be clearly laid out in the guidelines. If it's an essay competition - then say so. The respondents could see my editing ability from my two FA's...not that this has any bearing on whether I should be allowed to block vandals or delete non-noteworthy articles when they fail an AfD. One opposer said that writing a short intro was "disrespectful"...that kinda says it all.
  • Not using edit summaries: If failing to use edit summaries is "A Bad Thing" then it would be trivial to fix in the MediaWiki software. Edit summaries are optional. It's irrelevant. One editor commented that it represented a failure to attend to detail - but anyone who has read my comments in talk pages will know that the one thing that most people comment about is how anal I am about detail. That RfA respondant was looking at some easy-to-find gross statistic that didn't match a stereotype and using that as a reason to say "no". They themselves were guilty of failing to do "due diligence" in looking at my actual edits.
  • Considering someone's WP to mainspace ratio is a misunderstanding of what the word "ratio" means - it's simple mathematics and the people who said it were demonstrably WRONG (I tried to correct them...but they evidently didn't understand). Someone who works sufficiently actively in WP space to justify being an admin - but who does an immense amount of work in article space as well will have a poor RATIO of WP::Article edit count. Worse still, I've been fairly active in the WP: reference desks. That pushed my WP: edit count through the roof - but I haven't been working on policies and guidelines or XfD or any of the things the RfA folks wanted to see! The standard should be "How many substantive edits were made to guideline & policy areas, how much time was spend in XfD, RfA, etc"). They would prefer to see someone who did 3,000 edits in WP space an 1,500 in article space (a WP to mainspace of 2:1) versus someone who did 4,000 edits in WP space and 8,000 in mainspace (a WP to mainspace of 1:2)...the second editor is the more active Wikipedian with more WP-space edits - yet he gets 'dinged' on having a poor WP to mainspace editing ratio!?! We deny adminship to the second guy just because he's a more active Wikipedian!
None of those things is remotely a good reason to deny access to a handful of admin tools. It's not supposed to be a club for people who read RfA's and know the secret handshake to get in - it's a set of permission bits you turn on in a computer program to allow trusted individuals to do more with that program. The gold standard should be:
  1. Do you trust the character of the person so that they will not misuse these powers.
  2. Does the person have sufficient knowledge of the guidelines and policies relating to use of those tools.
I've never once been blocked or disciplined in any way - I put my reputation on the line by editing under my own name - hence it seems I could be trusted - even in 2006. I believe (with hindsight and two years more WP experience) that the younger me correctly answered all the questions about guidelines and policies that were fired at him.
If I truly wasn't worthy of adminship back in 2006, then I'm still not worthy because I haven't changed in ways that actually matter.
So I guess it's a "No" - I don't need the hassle it entails.
Thanks again for the suggestion (and what DID you do to poor old Bugzilla?)
SteveBaker (talk) 17:28, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I presume you mean Doczilla?
(Grin)
Oh, nothing, I assure you
(Grin)
Oh, and none of those "requirements" are listed precisely due to the reasons you note. Since it's about trust, and everyone has a different standard for trust, it was deemed better to suggest that potential candidates hang around RfA for a bit, to find out what the prevalent "criteria" lately seem to be.
Anyway, that was a fairly well-reasoned response (though I suppose I could go through point-by-point to clarify, it sounds like you'd be disinterested in that), and I respect your opinion. (Though that doesn't mean I won't *poke* you again in the future : ) - jc37 18:38, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
Hehehe - yes, I meant Doczilla. Bugzilla happens to be something else I'm fighting with right now! SteveBaker (talk) 18:44, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I think what jc37 meant by "I'll mention to you what I did to Doczilla" was "I'll mention to you what I MENTIONED to Doczilla." I gotta admit, though, I first read that sentence the same way you did.
As for the issue at hand, you don't have to get caught up in any aspects of adminship that you don't want to. Even though I've been really busy with other things in real life in the months since I got adminship, I've still found that the tools are handier than you might expect. Doczilla STOMP! 06:57, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I meant to say (sorry to reveal, I mean indicate, otherwise : ) - jc37 23:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Just as a note... as someone (who shouldn't be confused with that other, similar IP up above!) who is an admin in his other account, really, the RfA system is broken and has been broken for ages. When I went through it is was still pretty straightforward, now it's become the most regimented, senseless thing—like a popularity contest run by the Politburo. You're better off without it. The only things an admin can do that is sometimes useful is banning people but that always leads to drama, better to let someone else deal with it. Being able to see deleted pages is somewhat cool, but again, has limited returns. Being able to delete your own pages can be useful, esp. with the permanent-delete-trick, but yeah. That's about it. If you don't really see any of those as being worth all the effort, I agree with you 100%. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:22, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Personally I'd be wary of trusting an anonymous user's view of RfA even if (maybe especially if) the user claims to be an admin. Doczilla STOMP! 21:09, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
I was personally impressed with the notion that an admin can ban people : ) - jc37 23:21, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Yeah - but along with that goes the frustration with not being able to ban the people who REALLY deserve it! SteveBaker (talk) 00:33, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Unrelated question : Tux Kart

I've just now noticing that TuxKart was programmed by someone going by the name "Steve Baker". Was that you? —Preceding unsigned comment added by APL (talk • contribs) 23:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Yep - that was me. It was a very long time ago...I'm doing better now! SteveBaker (talk) 03:48, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Awesome!
I have sort of a emotional attachment to that game. As a student in my sr. year at U-Mass back in '03, It was one of the things that encouraged me to do a game as an independent final project instead of the easy, but deadly boring final projects recommended by the advisers. Writing a game for class credit was the most fun project I'd ever done, and it was in no small way responsible for getting me my current job making virtual reality software. I won't say that I owe it all to Tux Kart, but seeing that Tux Kart was made by just one person made me think "I can do that!" and, of course. the inevitable "I'd have done this differently!"
So ... "Thanks" is what I'm trying to say, here APL (talk) 16:57, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
The thing is here if you're interested. Sorry, I never got around to putting together the Linux version for download. (All my friends were on Windows.) IIRC, Wine handles it just fine, however. APL (talk) 17:38, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Wow! Inspiring the next generation and all! Suddenly it seems all worthwhile!  :-)
TuxKart was actually a very fast project - just a few weekends. Almost all of the code is in the PLIB library which I'd already written for a couple of previous projects. There is a 'fork' of TuxKart out there called 'SuperTuxKart' that's still being actively worked on (although not by me).
I wrote it (and a couple of earlier efforts) to try to inspire my son to stop playing computer games and start learning how to write them. The "Oliver's Math Class" track really is a fairly accurate model of my kid's math classroom as it was back then. He and I did a "show and tell" of TuxKart there and we thought it would be kinda neat to show it with the actual classroom. Anyway - it evidently worked - he's just started at University of Dallas doing a computer science and art dual-major...which will inevitably lead to a career in either games or simulation or something.
Thanks for that - it brightened up a dull day! SteveBaker (talk) 23:34, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Oh wow! I love the look of your game - Cel shading is cool! I've always wanted to try something with a Gooch shader - so it looks like an old blueprint or something. SteveBaker (talk) 23:37, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! Glad you like it! It took a lot of work. More than I expected, of course.
It seems like a Gooch shader might be a bit of an overkill for an old timey blueprint look. I think there you could get away with just edge detection drawn with white lines instead of black. (Coincidentally, Gamasutra just ran an article about edge detection. [10] Doesn't say much, though.) I think the fun part with a blue-print renderer would be adding in additional marks and notation to make it look like a real engineering drawing. That would be tricky since things like extension lines and dimension notations are inherently 2d. That makes sense when I imagine it static, but I'm not sure what would happen to notation that no longer applied as the scene rotated. Perhaps it could scribble in and out of existence as though by a phantom pencil.
In any case, best of luck to your son. And if has the opportunity to do a project instead of classwork, suggest that he go for it! It was the most fun part of my whole time in college. Probably the most educational as well. APL (talk) 03:12, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

RD

Hi Steve, I’m sorry, I just noticed you’re beck on the Reference Desk. (I’ve been editing there at a lower lever for a while due to real world commitments.) Happy to see you’ve returned! Cheers, --S.dedalus (talk) 05:58, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

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