User talk:Simplebrain

Welcome!

Hello, Simplebrain, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --Flockmeal 01:31, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Hu, Thanks for directing me to the useful tips. I will learn as many of them as my limited time permits, although I do have other responsibilities.

I do not believe in war, nor in in all this slash/and/burn attack on my article by Gene and others.

I agree with you that the format tips are here for very good reasons. Also, I like the Flockmeal's attitude. He offered to answer questions at his site. I will -- now that I happened upon this Discussion Page -- write him and tell him what a gentleman he truly is. Simplebrain 11:22, 2004 Nov 23 (UTC)

I got a good sense of what the Wikipedia style is from reading articles here. I recommend that practice to you. I was able to skim the style manual and get the essential idea very quickly. I have not attempted to memorize it. I look up details in it occasionally when needed. If you look at my contributions here, you can see that I have been active, even though I am very attentive to detail. Hu 08:10, 2004 Nov 25 (UTC)

Taxman: I am willing to work with others, and I AM MOST WILLING to collaborate. I thank you for the civility with which you express these concerns. I strive with my heart and soul to acheive a neutral point of view. I plead with you to inform me as to how I may get in touch with an Administrator of the Wikipedia that I might learn how to remove a topic from it. I find it necessary to do this because my topic has been defamed and distorted. This is unjust to my field of interest, so unless my article is protected (which I learned about from reading and studying the Wiki Syle Manual), I must go and take my topic with me. Please let me know the address to write to for such removal.Simplebrain

You agreed to abide by Wikipedia rules when you hit the "Save page" button. The rules, at the bottom of each Edit page, say:

"All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Wikipedia:Copyrights for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, do not submit it.".

Your work has now been submitted to the GFDL, and you cannot "take it with you". Rick K 23:29, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

Its my understanding that GFDL is not a surrender of copyright but a licence for your work's use and distribution. If sections of a piece are unambiguously yours, you could, I believe, withdraw them and take legal action against Wikipedia for breach of copyright if they are reinstated. I'm not a lawyer though. However, your work is not "submitted to the GFDL". The GFDL is the licence under which work is distributed, not a body you submit work to. I advise you to contact a lawyer or at the very least an editor with greater knowledge of copyright issues. I believe Anthony DiPierro is interested in these areas and might be able to point you in the right direction.Dr Zen 00:44, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

ANY legal threat will be dealt with by IMMEDIATE blocking from editing. This is standard Wikipedia policy, and WILL be enforced. Dr. Zen, you are certainly looking to cause trouble here, you might want to back off. Rick K 06:06, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

Legal threats are not blockable offenses, please don't misrepresent Wikipedia's policy. Rhobite 18:27, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

Rhobite, legal threats are VERY MUCH blockable offenses, and blocking has occurred many times for people who have threatened legal action. Rick K 20:28, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

I'm certainly not a lawyer, but I do believe RickK is absolutely right. You own the copyright to your own work. This gives you the right to re-release it under a different (perhaps more or less restrictive) license at a later date. What it doesn't give you the right to do is retract it from wikipedia. Once you've released it under the GFDL, you can't take it back. The terms of the GFDL still apply. You're not obliged to continue to offer it under those terms, but you can't stop other people from doing so. Shane King 06:28, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

Secondarily seconding this - that by you licensing your contributions under the Wikimedia copyright-message licence as specified, according to Wikipedia:Copyrights, "you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever". If this is not what you intended, well, sorry, but you should have read the clear guide beforehand.

James F. (talk) 11:10, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It is the very topic itself which has been misrepresented by this gentleman. He sprinkles his hijacking of my description of my field of expertise with words like "somehow," "supposed," "claimed," as if the claims can't be clarified in a fuller exposition. It is very frustrating, as I do not see a vehicle for rebuttal of false charges. He, who is not thoroughly acquainted with my science, is telling the world what my science is supposed to be!!

I invite you, Gene Smith, with all your gifts as an artist, and as a knowledgable mathematician, to join the enterprise, and thus contribute to the human race becoming more ethical, but you respond by doing this fashionable brand of philosophy namely by becoming the cutting critic.

Swashbuckling sword-play is what passes for doing creative philosophy in some circles. Who needs destructive critics! Who needs more Edit Wars, or wars of any kind? I don't. Simplebrain 19:21, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

I have edited your discursive discussion out of the page, Simplebrain, and salvaged the main elements as an Alternative Evaluation. Hu 08:00, 2004 Nov 25 (UTC)

A plan for the article

I explained to you what it takes to make a good article, in my response to your plea, on my talk page. In particular, I laid out a plan for you there: I suggest the article begin with a clear summary paragraph to introduce the topic, then a short descriptive section where the subject is clearly explained, then the mathematical analysis, then some positive reflections if you like, then some opposing viewpoint, then finally not much more than about three external links to sites you feel are important to the topic. It took me quite some time to lay things out for you there, but you seem to have ignored it. Well, I have no claim on your time, but Wikipedia does have a claim on the pages it hosts, and the collaborative efforts of the editors here are a peer review committe that you better get used to. Hu 08:22, 2004 Nov 25 (UTC)

Response by Simplebrain

Thank you so very much, Hu, for salvaging something of what I wrote in the topic I proposed, in re the field in which I work and do research. Now perchance I actually do have a vehicle for refuting outright mistakes and for clarifying points that were confusing to a reader.

I am still at a loss to know why a respectable online encyclopedia allows people who don't work in a specific field to smear and defame the efforts of those who do (or did) work in that area of study??!!??

Perhaps I will further contribute in that "Alternative Evaluation" section, avoiding hype, and striving to conform to the style. In the past, whenever I would answer an objection to something Gene Ward Smith wrote about my teacher's output, he would delete it, as if he could no longer use that point as a bludgeon.

Hu: I do have a question for you, namely: why can't I delete a word or two which is misleading, or false-to-fact from an article, since Rick said to me: "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly....don't submit it." Since my stuff was deleted on grounds that someone thought it to be "rubbish," why can't I do likewise??

Professor Hartman is now turning over in his grave regarding this review of a more than 300-page book by someone who found one weak point in it somewhere and who then proceeds to imply that the whole book is nonsense. [And if he were alive, since he used to be a Judge in a court in a suburb of Berlin, he would have the legal skills to institute a lawsuit for defamation and slander directed at some presumptive expounder of the state of affairs in contemporary value science].

It blows my mind that a person with a narrow and extremely biased perspective --present company excepted-- gets to represent a field of expertise of which he has limited knowledge and acquaintance. He has made up his mind in advance that there cannot be a science dealing with values, and thus he looks at the world with that filter, and notices confirmation to back up his prejudice. Sure he is qualified to evaluate the mathematical aspects of Hartman's work, but when it comes to understanding how science works, and what is going on in the field, and how unsettled both Physics and Biology are at the moment -- the revolutionary ferment unfolding on both a Theory of Everything, and on whether there truly are 'quantum jumps' in the Theory of Evolution -- he would express more humility, rather than the pompous arrogance he does display.

In spite of it all, I like the guy.

Gene Ward Smith has already made some valuable contributions to the science, albeit perhaps unintensionally so. Wouldn't it be ideal, though, if he would really put his heart into it! How much more value would be generated as a result.!!

I want to wish each and everyone here a Happy Holiday.Simplebrain 18:35, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Do not delete material on Talk pages.

I am sorry, but it was necessary to revert an edit of yours on the Talk:Science of Value page, since there was no way to untangle your additions from your deletions. Subsequently, I've tried to restore the two main commentaries you added to that talk page. I hope this has been successful and meets with your approval.

You can't delete material on Talk pages, you can only add comments. Article pages allow more freedom (but restricted freedom) to delete or replace material. On Talk pages you can add material and comments very liberally, but you must not change existing material, especially in any way that alters the content of people's comments (including your own, if responses have been already made). Minor edits to fix things like broken links are of course permitted. Hu 06:58, 2004 Nov 28 (UTC)