User talk:Armondikov/archive7

Archive 7
In which we talk crap about PhDs, some custom CSS, gender ambiguity and the realisation that nothing much has happened to create an interesting summary.

Pat on the back

Nice work on LessWrong! Also, you may be interested in my comments on your essay, just fyi. Tetronian ^{you're clueless} 15:34, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I have been reading them. It's interesting stuff. I will think about commenting once I have taken it in and thought of something to say. ^theist 15:38, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Hanlon's Razor

Thank'ee kindly. EddyP (talk) 16:29, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Although as Hanlon's Razor is just a special case of Occam's Razor, you were still right. ^theist 16:31, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh my god

What the fuck? Did that just change before my eyes or have a I drunk too much? Did DG not change "its" to "it's"? Holy shit! I'm questioning my judgement now. Crundy^{Talk nerdy to me} 22:04, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Skitt’s Law, definitely. Get some sleep! ^theist 22:05, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Holy shitfuckdamn!! I swear that this was the other way round!! What the hell is wrong with me?? Crundy^{Talk nerdy to me} 22:06, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I think your eyes are just playing tricks and you're reading what you want to read. ^theist 22:08, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I think it's a liberal conspiracy against me. You changed the dartabarse in the background after my edit. I'm fucking onto you!! Crundy^{Talk nerdy to me} 22:19, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, server access has to be useful for something. ^theist 22:25, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Wigo World Post (fighting back at the clinic)

Damn, you beat me to it... That's what I get for posting on Facebook before I post on RW I suppose. :) SirChuckB^{El...ipses are Cool...} 07:55, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Ha! Sorry for that. I was wondering if you were just ignoring it. Hopefully by the time we get to RW 5.6, we should have an extension that automatically ports links between WIGO and social networking things. ^theist 07:58, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

EvoWiki logo

Well we have EvoWiki now, sort of, its at evolutionwiki.org. The fate of the EvoWiki domain I am still not sure of as Nick Matzke owns it and he hasn't gotten back to me. Anyway, you had mentioned if we take it over as a project you wanted to redo the logo and bring it closer to the RW logo. You still interested in that? Tmtoulouse (talk) 16:15, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah. Do you have original PSD (or whatever) files for the RW logo? I could also work on facelifting to have RW style navigation templates if you think that's worth it. On the one hand I don't want to tread on toes or spoil peoples existing work, but on the other hand if we "have" evowiki, we should damn well have it. You know what I mean? ^theist 16:53, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I will see what I have of the brain, honestly I think nx has most of the "originals." There are some glaring issues at EvoWiki at the moment, such as that I never got a copy of what extensions they were running or their image directory. Which means just getting the place back to baseline is going to take some time. Until that is done I don't know if it is worth investing much more in templates other than to direct people here who want to work on articles.

But eventually, yeah, I think unifying the themes of our site with evowiki is ideal. Tmtoulouse (talk) 17:04, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

(ec) I sent you (Armondikov) the blender file for the RW logo, and I can give you the xcf too if you want, but it's just a rescaled version of File:New logo large.png plus the text. -- Nx / talk 17:06, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I was meaning as more of a longer term project, we would need to get it operational first. I certainly don't have the time or inclination to do it all now. But I do have plans for the logo and could do it reasonably soon. Despite it being quite superficial, I think it's a very important step in the right direction. ^theist 18:34, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Here's my rough idea for the logo, nothing special, just File:Ammonoid02.jpg overlaid on top of the brackets and a slight modification of the text used on the RW logo. I've uploaded the xcf too. -- Nx / talk 10:27, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Stop f**king reading my mind!! Anyway, my idea was essentially identical, but redo the fossil in CG with a similar surface to the brain. I'd say to put that one up there for now as it seems perfectly fine to me. ^theist 11:20, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Projection mapping

Have you seen this one? Генгис^{RationalWiki GOLD member} 10:47, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Not before. Fucking A. ^theist 10:56, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

This is still the one I want to emulate when I do The Magic Flute next year. ^theist 11:02, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Let's wreck the place

please let other people have fun too. ^{An iron, yet caring fist} 18:57, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Hehehehe... I have been wanting to do that for years. ^theist 19:10, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Well you missed Nx, and MC. Who is a crat now. That was the flaw in your evil plan. ^{An iron, yet caring fist} 19:12, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I used my super root powerz to recrat myself. -- Nx / talk 19:13, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

MoFo.^theist 19:14, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Gender

We are really, really confused, and reading your talkpage archive hasn't helped either. Sorry to bother you. ^{An iron, yet caring fist} 02:33, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, dear, I'll leave you confused. xxx ^theist 09:18, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Though for the record I do believe gender ambiguous pronouns to be quite, quite pretentious. ^theist 11:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

oh hush. ^{An iron, yet caring fist} 14:50, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Dragged over from...

...here. Thanks for your response. Your opinion is very different to the impression he has and indeed the advice he has been getting. I should add here that he is a product of a European education - French biology degree, 1 year marine biology masters at Marseilles, 2nd and current year in Faro, Portugal on the Erasmus scheme. Will complete next year probably in Spain.

The advice he got from day 1 was always that a degree would get him little more than a lab rat job with few prospects and that while a masters is better, the best career paths would only be available to him if he got his doctorate. Perhaps this is part of our continental cousins' deep attachment to qualifications. Although he was told roughly the same thing at an interview at Plymouth Uni and has American colleagues he works with with similar opinions.

I hope he's right. And I'm not going to tell him somebody on the internet thinks he isn't! :) Ajkgordon (talk) 23:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I do think it opens up more than a few opportunities, so they're right there; it's certainly the minimum for any academic job or university teaching position. The "lab rat" thing might be a bit of an exaggeration, but if you're working in an industry you can progress a fair amount with just a degree and some hard work (there's no easy way, unfortunately). A postgraduate qualification is a very big dick to swing around when facing of against a lot of people being churned through university.

However, it's extremely difficult work. Often working on your own for long periods of time with stuff that plainly doesn't work, with odd hours, lots of stress, a high drop out rate and a good chance of developing some sort of disorder. You have to be like Heston Blumenthal, who said about his restaurant that he's often came home late, shattered, annoyed, dissatisfied and angry at it but has never woken up thinking "I don't want to go into work today". If you don't connect with the research and really want to do it for its own sake, rather than for an end like "I can get a better job this way", you may well end up miserable for 3-4 years. I just value happiness over job prospects. ^theist 10:25, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I should add another point; it does depend on the discipline. Chemistry is very engineering and industry orientated. A degree and a year placement scheme is good enough to get you on the ladder and moving. I imagine that if I hadn't buggered up my interviews (meh, I suck) and gone away to a company for a year instead of doing a Masters project I wouldn't be doing a PhD now. I'd be off in some huge lab selling my soul to AstraZenica or something. It's different for different areas depending on what careers are available (I'm going to be a college professor!). ^theist 11:15, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, the primary reason he's doing it is because he loves it. Passionate about it actually. I hope his passion and his job prospects remain high! Ajkgordon (talk) 15:49, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Excellent. Then go for it! ^theist 16:37, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

He is! Ajkgordon (talk) 17:10, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

:D ^theist 17:11, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Snow

If all snowflakes are different, why does snow look all the same? Pointed moment (talk) 10:47, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Because the ice crystals that form snow flakes are considerably smaller than "snow". So while the former has measurable order that can be seen as unique to our human pattern recognition skills, the latter are more disordered and homogenised. ^theist 17:04, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

This appears to relate to crowd psychology. Pointed moment (talk) 22:16, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

It really, really isn't. ^theist 22:49, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Custom skin

When you asked whether we should develop a custom skin, I said we should wait till Vector. So are you interested in this? I don't want to do it alone, and I especially don't want to devote a lot of time to this if the response will be "change it back NAO" -- Nx / talk 11:50, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

The response would be "change it back" regardless. Do you have any ideas about what to actually change? ^theist 11:57, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

I know, but it's different if I can get a couple others involved. Anyway, at this point my problem is that I have no ideas, we need to create a consistent style for the site, right now it's a mish- mash, so I need mockups, they can be in photoshop, don't have to be functional. -- Nx / talk 12:16, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

I have no ideas either. I quite like Vector as it's fairly stylish. As you've pointed out, usability studies have been done to produce Vector so it's on the right track. I also like the light, clean colours, although it's true it blends with WP and other "default" installs a little much. Not sure what you mean about "mish-mash". Some of the templating is inconsistent, that's true enough, but that will always be a work-in-progress. ^theist 12:27, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Well yeah, I like vector too, but I'd also like to have something unique. We don't need to make a new skin from scratch, we can modify vector - that's why I told you to wait till vector, vector has cleaner code and of course we'd be building on a more modern foundation. (E.g. the sidebar in monobook is very hackish, the logo is actually supposed to be above the page content and the sidebar below it, they use css hacks to position it in a sidebar - in vector, it's a single div).

Some of the templating is inconsistent, sure, but e.g. the portal icons and the wigo pages, with their solid, colorful blocks and cartoonish style, don't really fit in with vector's more subdued colors, gradients and subtle styling. I do like the wigos, and it's not very jarring, not as much as the old main page was on vector. That cartoonish, more colorful style is probably also more appropriate for RW. -- Nx / talk 16:57, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean now. If we look at the portal portal, we can see the differences. Vector's clean look seems to concentrate on lines of only 1px across, while the templates are 2px. I think we can change those to 1px, and perhaps figure out a more generic template system, I tried briefly in a sandbox but couldn't figure out the best way to get flexibility and consistency combined.

Can we alter the left hand bar to look more like those templates, perhaps? With a colour block behind the headings (Navigation, Community, and Toolbox) rather than the lines? It might bring it in a little. Then we can look at something similar on the top bar and elsewhere. I'd mock it up in photoshop but might not be able to do so for a while due to some other commitments.

Also, silly question, as I don't think people would like it even if we could, is it possible to skin individual sections of pages to match the colour scheme of the relevant navigation template? This would make the articles look a little closer to the WIGOs with their coloured bars. It would mean perhaps switching to a more subtle set of colours, as some of those are a little... strong. But it might be worth an experiment or two. ^theist 17:44, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Best way to avoid Oh Noes responses is to discuss in a slightly more public place, at least. Also, vector isn't that pretty, but I don't care much, especially if it allows easier custom looks. Nice to see portal:portal mentioned, I mostly built it so I could tweak them all into the same general look, and so anyone who wanted to could do the same. I still think the colored bars across the WIGO pages will look so 2010 in about a month. And gradients will look so 2009 about six months ago. But ignore that, anyone who wants to make the site look better, especially killing the "every wiki looks like WP" part is a cool dude/dudette/lumenette in my book. ħuman 05:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I wanted to wait with the more public discussion until we at least get the ball rolling (to avoid having it die from lack of interest), but I've changed my mind. It's at Forum:Custom skin. -- Nx / talk 07:18, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

This was just to make mock-ups and present them, which I think would lead to slightly better productivity than just saying to the mob "we want to change it, discuss". I don't think we should fear doing some "behind-the-scenes" stuff, especially as the site grows and we gain more members than an open-ended discussion could support. ^theist 14:56, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, you're probably right. -- Nx / talk 15:36, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, you're definitely right. On a related note, I made this just for fun: http://rationalwiki.org/nx/animtest.html The png fle (which is just all the frames arranged horizontally) is a bit large though (400Kb), but the funny thing is it's much smaller than an animated png would be. -- Nx / talk 06:39, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Love it! ^theist 13:04, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Ho Ho. Can you put a couple of propellers on the "wings" and make it fly off the screen? (OK probably not.)--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 13:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Darling, I have a question for you

How many buns do you have? --Idiot number 59 (talk) 19:20, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

More than you can handle. ^theist 20:19, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Clever. Clever! But I'm kinda sensitive about the fact that I have only one hand. Please don't mention that again. Btw, how many do you exactly have - 3, 4, maybe 59? --Idiot number 59 (talk) 20:24, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Palestinian loss of land

Was there a particular reason to delete the image that shows the war-time (illegal) gains of Israel from 1948 onwards? δ_ij$^{i.broke.it.}$ 03:48, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

If you are referring to this edit, Armondikov just moved it down the page. ListenerX^TalkerX 03:55, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

My bad ]. I'm sorry...that was unfortunate timing for an image not to load. When I went to the page I didn't see it and when I went to the differential I didn't scroll down. Sorry. δ_ij$^{i.broke.it.}$ 04:00, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Really wide images like that should be centered as it otherwise messes with the text or is thumbed too small to read. For the record, I don't particularly care about the politics of Israel. They're all cunts, of course, but that's because every country is ran by cunts. I have neither a hate-on nor undying support for the place. ^theist 15:45, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Black Swan.

Just finished it. Great book, thanks for mentioning it.--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 19:50, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

That was quick. :) ^theist 16:09, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Amazon Kindle+train journey to work+quick reader.--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 16:25, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

That explains it. I've taken over three months on it, but that's really on-and-off reading. I must have at least 8 books on the go right now since I don't really sit down and plow through them. Also, it turns out that a book about low probability high impact events isn't the sort of thing you want to read on a plane... ^theist 16:49, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Stephen Hawking

And there are claims that his (Stephen Hawking’s) wife abuses him. [1] This claim is references, why did you remove it? Proxima Centauri (talk) 08:53, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Because it was completely irrelevant to the section. It's gossip about his personal life. It didn't flow on from the preceding paragraph at all. You started a sentence with "And". It used a straight link rather than a ref tag. ^theist 17:59, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Patrol

How does rationalWiki patrol this type of stuff?

Just rollback and ignore it. ^theist 13:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Richard Littlejohn

Thanks for fixing my clumsy wikisyntax (derp!) Lacrimosus (talk) 00:18, 21 April 2011 (UTC)