User talk:Milton Beychok/Archive 4

Milton Beychok

Current talk page

Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3, Archive 4, Archive 5, Archive 6, Archive 7, Archive 8, Archive 9, Archive 10, Archive 11, Archive 12

I just archived the last batch of postings.

That is why this page looks so empty and desolate at the moment. Milton Beychok 01:41, 6 October 2008 (CDT)

changes

All these changes (move tab gone too) relate to a software update, as far as i can tell. I assume they will be restored with time. Another difference I noticed was that in the special pages link the different opions are now categorised rather than being in alphabetical order. Chris Day 20:15, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Could I get your thoughts on Incident Command System

Especially the Related Articles. My feeling, increasingly, is that Disaster Management, not that we have a category for it, is more Engineering than anything else, but with dashes of Health Sciences and Politics, and, for specific kinds of disasters, Physics and such.

What I'd hope to get from you, even if it were just as stub R-templates, would be some categories for toxic accidents. Plume analysis is probably too detailed here. Howard C. Berkowitz 05:56, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Howard, I added 5 links to your Related Links subpage. Three were to non-existing article as yet and one was to an existing article. If you think that Engineering, Politics and Health Science are involved, then you should add links to them in the "Parent topics" section of that subpage. Hope this helps, Milton Beychok 07:14, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks; you gave me some of what I needed. One of the problems in the field is that so many catastrophic events that could be terrorism are described only in those terms. For chemical accidents, there's a good deal about spill confinement, but much less on pure industrial toxic releases.

Duplicate posts aren't a bad thing in this contact. For large disasters, it's a fine idea to have a backup command post. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:35, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Piquet

So basically you're saying the article proper may be complete enough, it's just subpages needed? Peter Jackson 17:45, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Peter, as I said, I don't know enough about the game to comment upon whether or not the main article content needs work. But the subpages should definitely be created as I noted. Regards, Milton Beychok 17:50, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Will check approval with Matt/Chris

I started out signing ToA and setting the approval code to 0, which is what I thought the instructions said to do. The template started giving me error messages. What I suspect happened is that there is a change or bug; I set ToA and 0 before and it worked. The code, I suspect, is assuming that only the Approval editor sets to 0, but it's got an internal conflict.

Anyway, I have a message in to Chris.

Other idea

You did give me another idea. Would it be useful to have log and ln as articles, so you can link them whenever needed rather than explain?Howard C. Berkowitz 19:56, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, you've lost me. I don't understand what you are asking. Milton Beychok 19:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that you explained the natural log function in your text. Would it be useful to have an ln and a log article, which you could just embed it the text (i.e., ln(x)), and anyone wanting the function definition could just click on it? Howard C. Berkowitz 20:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Yup, that would be a good idea. Such an article is needed. Wikipedia has one that could serve as a start or as a guide. That is just one of the many, many "infrastructure" articles that are still needed. That is why I wrote Pressure, Bar, U.S. customary units, Specific heat ratio, Parts-per notation, Vapor pressure, Heat of combustion, Meteorology and some others. So if you, or one of our mathematics authors, could write an article about log and ln, it would be most useful. Milton Beychok 21:37, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

First, the article looks great. Congratulations.

Now, I pause for hysterics, looking to the presumed heavens for my algebra I teacher and guidance counselor, who advised me against chemistry, and to stay in pure biology, because I could never handle the math. So, I would up in computer science (OK, one of my best friends in high school is now an IEEE Fellow in Digital Signal Processing), but I would up much more quantitative than anyone expected. High school mathematics teaching and I just didn't get along. Still, the thought of myself as a mathematics editor does cause giggles. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:56, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I suggest to continue this discussion at Talk:Mathematics#Accessibility of mathematical notation across workgroups. --Daniel Mietchen 10:32, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I feel like an idiot ... because I just found that we already have an article on Logarithms. It has a section on notational variants that I will revise somewhat and expand to make it clearer (in my opinion). Milton Beychok 15:24, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Meteorology

I am not an expert there either but I would suggest to ask some of these people because they have indicated relevant interests on their user pages. --Daniel Mietchen 08:31, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Started article on autoclave

The need came to me when I was adding to some material on biological decontamination, and then it occurred to me I should generalize it. I've done a lot of microbiological work, but also home canning, on which I'll start an article.

Thought I'd let you know about it in case you wanted to add anything about chemical process engineering use. There's no metadata on it as I need to find out if there is or is not a food sciences workgroup, or if cooking-related things go elsewhere. It probably will fall under Engineering, Health Sciences, something for cooking, Biology at least. It certainly could go under Chemical Engineering if you want it. I've just never worked with a chemical process one -- room-size hospital sterilizers yes. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:45, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

US units

Hi Milton, I looked at the US units article. It seems OK to me except for one thing. You don't make quite clear how the US base units are defined. I happen to know that the inch is defined as 2.54 cm and perhaps there are similar definitions for fluid ounce, etc.? It would be nice to have that in the article.--Paul Wormer 10:50, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Paul, I don't understand what you mean. The Length table in the article shows that 1 inch is equivalent to 2.54 cm. The Liquid Volume table shows that 1 fluid ounce is equivalent to 29.574 ml.

I only intended the article to provide the equivalences between U.S. units and metric units. Researching the history of all the U.S. units and how they were originally defined would entail a lot of work that I don't believe is warranted. Is that what you meant? Milton Beychok 19:47, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

There are some legal definitions of the U.S. units; I can look up some of that. I also have, in the past, looked up some of the history of those definitions (the inch used to be 1/39.37 m, and the change has made for some interesting problems in surveying). Sometime in my copious free time I can look up those references again, and either edit the article directly, or dump them on the talk page. Anthony Argyriou 20:11, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Anthony. I really don't believe any history is needed ... but if you wish to write a history section, please feel free to do so. Milton Beychok 23:47, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Your testimony?

Please let us have it! --Larry Sanger

Henry's law

I got Henry's law for you! Keep them coming ;-) D. Matt Innis 02:38, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Cleaning up

Hi Milton, I read on the forum that you're going round cleaning up articles. I sometimes look back at my own stuff and see odd formulations (usually due to my lack of command of the English). Whenever you see some strange phrases in my articles you would do me a favor by correcting them. You don't offend me by that, au contraire as the Cajuns (Arcadians) say. --Paul Wormer 09:30, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Emergency operations

Thanks for the article and link. Incident command system is a little more developed, but I'm now working on Federal Emergency Management Agency and will then do Department of Homeland Security. It's beginning to appear reasonable to create a civil defense article, dealing internationally with civilian protection, which was a far higher Soviet than U.S. prioity. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:42, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Milton

Plato seems to be working now, with funny hat on! Martin Cohen 10:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

re Thanks

Anthony, thanks for fleshing out the History section of the Meteorology article. Milton Beychok 00:19, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Milton, happy to contribute in a minor way. Didn't want my Italian countrymen (Torricelli, Galileo) to miss their credit — my family name originally 'Sebastiano', and I'm FBI (full-blooded Italian) — and felt John Dalton's pioneering work also creditable. Admire your work and good-humored forum posts. --Anthony.Sebastian 01:32, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Greek to me

Thanks -- yes, the math font is much clearer than the font that comes with the wiki-editing software. For the article titles, I think I'll use (Greek letter) but also have a redirect from just plain (Letter) for those who are used to the WP naming convention. Bruce M.Tindall 17:46, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I was about to start on "Theta" and noticed that your "Henry's law" article has a link to that term, in the explanation that "T-sub-theta" means standard temperature (298 K). If I carry out my normal plan w/r/t Greek-letter articles, this link will now go, via a redirect, to "Theta (disambiguation)". But what is your intention for that link? Do you want it to go to the article about the Greek letter? Or perhaps do you want it to go to an article -- not yet existing, but I'm sure it will someday -- about "standard temperature [and pressure]" in chemistry? And if so, should the link be from the phrase "standard temperature" rather than from "theta"? I'll just skip Theta for now, so I don't create a new page that causes your link to wind up going somewhere it doesn't want to go. Bruce M.Tindall 22:30, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Why?

I nominated the draft version for approval, so that the newer, better version can replace the currently approved version. David E. Volk 16:23, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Milton, happy holidays to you too. I read coal-fired plant (see its talk). Somehow I thought that you lived in San Diego and was thinking of you today when I heard of the F18 crash. Now that I checked your user page again, I see that you live near LA. I don't know why I had San Diego in mind. Best regards. --Paul Wormer 10:56, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Aspect ratio

Milt, I'm sorry but I can't help you out. I have never come across this problem before. Let me know if you discover the reason. Chris Day 03:00, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

CO2 emission

Milton, I found (thru WP) this Federal Report on CO2 emission. Maybe it is of some use when you write the section in the coal-fired plants on the CO2 emission.

It is not difficult to give a rough estimate of the amount of CO2 emitted by a 500MW coal-fired plant with an efficiency of 40%.

I use that 1 kg coal gives 0.4×25 MJ = 10 MWs of energy and 44/12 = 3.7 kg of CO2. Hence a 500MW plant consumes 50 kg coal/s and gives a CO2 emission of 50×3.7 = 185 kg/s.

(I found at WP the number: 1 kg CO2 per 1 kWh, which gives an emission of 5×10⁵ kg/hour = 139 kg/s, which is in the same ballpark as my 185 kg/s).

So, say a plant emits 150 kg CO2 per sec, then in a year 4.7× 10⁹ = 4.7 Gkg of CO2. It sure sounds a lot. --Paul Wormer 14:31, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Paul, thanks for your comments. I already had a copy of that EIA report which you referenced. I hope to focus my CO2 write-up on worldwide power plants rather than just the USA.

The CO2 formed in a conventional coal-fired power plant depends upon (a) the thermal efficiency which may vary from about 32% to 42% and (b) the carbon content of the coal which may vary from about 60 weight percent for lignite coal to about 90 weight percent for anthracite coal. The large majority of currently existing conventional coal-fired plants operate from about 33% to 35% thermal efficiency. The value of 1 kg CO2 per kWh represents an average of currently existing plants. In fact, the U.S.A. average in 1998 was 0.96 kg CO2 per kWh.

Your estimate was higher than that because you used 40% efficiency and a coal carbon content of 100 weight percent.

Thanks once more, Milton Beychok 23:56, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Well Happy Birthday in advance!

I shall wrap more of your packages.

If you would, take a look at AN/. While it deals with military electronic engineering, which is clearly not your area, there's actually no substantive electronic content. The evaluation criterion is whether it is a clear description of an engineering designation system for a class of equipment, not how the equipment works (other than at the level of the examples). This is really an indexing or catalog node in the information tree, so you will find individual articles on things like APG-63 or ALE-47

If this isn't comfortable for you to evaluate, I understand perfectly. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have any other active Military editors, so Engineering is the only thing left.

Howard C. Berkowitz 07:32, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Milt, I guess your secret is out :) Nice work on three (or is it four) more approved articles. You have inspired me to make an effort to start targeting deveolped biology articles and moving them towards. I need to divide my time between real writing and the housework. Chris Day 22:11, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Would a "complaint system" improve how we deal with disputes

Thanks for reposting your proposal on the Constabulary forum. I think the details will require much thought and can be dealt with later. Seems for now we see how the discussion thread evolves and whether anyone else likes this route. Maybe someone will improve the idea; maybe someone will have a better idea. - Robert Badgett 01:05, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Your attention to a minor detail

Take a look here. D. Matt Innis 00:31, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay by me. I can add those very minor grammar copy edits to the Draft after approval. Milton Beychok 00:43, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Just to make sure, do you want the "its" in the article? I see that you took it out 'after' I put it into the approved version. Should I take it back out? PS. - did you also see the one below that? It actually changes the meaning more if I remember correctly. D. Matt Innis 05:37, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Hehe, I looked at it again and I have to admit, the is's and its are making me go cross-eyed. It's probabaly okay either way. Let me know which way you want it and I'll put it that way in the article, too. D. Matt Innis 05:42, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Also, do you want me to replace the Vacuum Distillation article with the one that you fixed the images. D. Matt Innis 05:47, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Boiling point got messed up because both of us were making changes at the same time. What would be best is if both the approved article and the draft article had the two revisions exactly as Joe Quick had made them. I believe that, altho fairly minor, his two revisions were correct grammar. His revisions did not change any meaning, they were just better grammar. Milton Beychok 08:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

As for Vacuum distillation, it was written when I was using my old 17 inch monitor at 800 x 600 resolution and the image locations looked good to me. But now, with my new 19 inch monitor at 1024 x 768 resolution, there was way too much white space in the article. I think that more people now use 1024 X 768 and few people still use 800 x 600, so I changed the image locations to eliminate the white space. Sorry, to be so long winded, but it would be nice if you replace the approved Vacuum distillation with the Draft version where I changed the image locations. Milton Beychok 08:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

It is now past midnight here and I am off to bed. Thanks for all your help, Matt. Milton Beychok 08:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Alright, that is what I'll do. I think Joe's version is the current version of the Boiling point article and I can certainly oblige on the vacuum distillation article. I had to give it up last night as well! D. Matt Innis 14:51, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Hey, did I miss your birthday! D. Matt Innis 15:21, 4 January 2009 (UTC)