User talk:Tom Morris

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Aleksander Stos 07:43, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

Hastiness

You might want to let more than an hour or so go by before you consider a question closed; I was researching a considered comment at Talk:The Republic and while I was doing so, found out that the page had been moved out from underneath me. J. Noel Chiappa 19:02, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

I'm very sorry about that. I hope that the move to The Republic (dialogue of Plato) is satisfactory. --Tom Morris 19:08, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

I'm OK with it, but I don't know about others. J. Noel Chiappa 20:13, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

Scientology & Criticism

Tom, see this section about the CoS. We absolutely must do better on this; while I don't disagree with the presence of the content, I have to agree with Stephen that it is extremely amateurish and too 'pedian for us. --Robert W King 09:28, 28 April 2008 (CDT)

see my response on Talk:Church of Scientology. --Tom Morris 11:15, 28 April 2008 (CDT)

Self-harming

Enough of that! Your content is very impressive. Good luck with the research day. Ro Thorpe 10:17, 29 April 2008 (CDT)

Supreme Court

I've been away from CZ for a couple of months and just noticed you changed the name of the U.S. Supreme Court in the article I wrote about Miranda, and I wanted to bring a couple of points to your attention in case you're not a lawyer or legal writer and so not familiar with common conventions in the U.S. (1) The formal name of the federal high court is not "Supreme Court of the United States" but "Supreme Court of the United States of America," but its Blue Book designation is "U.S.," so it's generally referred to in even formal legal writing as "U.S. Supreme Court." (2) To be consistent, if you're going to call it "Supreme Court of the United States," you should call the state court mentioned in the article the "Supreme Court of [the State of] Arizona." The reason that isn't the usual practice is that when you're reading anything that frequently mentions courts' names, having the jurisdiction first in each court's name makes for faster reading and better comprehension. -- k kay shearin 23:10, 18 May 2008 (CDT)

I made no judgment as to the validity of the name. I followed common usage on other articles and the website of the Supreme Court in changing them so they all point to the same place. Feel free to use the talk page on Supreme Court of the United States to discuss the naming with those in the Law workgroup. --Tom Morris 03:08, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

This problem should also be mentioned on the discussion page of CZ:Naming_Conventions, as some people there are convinced that there is one common name for anything and no problems of deciding names for article titles. Given that that is the policy page for CZ, it ranks higher than the Law workgroup. My initial comment is that it is against CZ policy to refer to the United States of America as "United States", although if it is a formal name then that would not be true. From what I read above, U.S. Supreme Court would seem a better designation. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 06:07, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

Martin Heidegger

I recently started the Martin Heidegger page, mainly so as to have some live content for the related articles pages elsewhere (Amish/Related_Articles since some have asserted that the Amish may have achieved the "free relationship" to technology that Heidegger called for). Be that as it may, I am a bit concerned that I have put too much emphasis on Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology in the intro section because of my own interest in that question.

Just thought you should know since Heidegger is on your "to do" list. Anyway, I have no immediate plans to develop the Heidegger article beyond its presnt introduction stage, so feel free to have at it.

James F. Perry 22:58, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

• Thanks. I saw that - it's on my watchlist and will hopefully expand it soon. --Tom Morris 04:55, 26 May 2008 (CDT)

Titles of Bible-book articles

Hi, Tom -- J. Noel just sent me a message suggesting that articles on Bible books could be named, e.g., "Genesis (Bible book)" because they may need disambiguation (e.g., from "Genesis (musical group)", "Exodus (novel)", etc.). But since it's you and not I creating these articles I thought I'd pass the suggestion along to you in case you want to consider it. Bruce M.Tindall 11:28, 6 June 2008 (CDT)

Thank you for authoring in computers

Tom, I am pleased to note your recent activity in the Computers Workgroup. Much appreciated!Pat Palmer 16:42, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Thanks. I'll be writing more for CZ:Computers Workgroup, as well as working hard in philosophy and religion. --Tom Morris 19:15, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Are you suggesting computers are not philosophies and religions? Will you next tell me that there is gambling in Rick's cafe?

At times, I look at Mac vs. Windows arguments as rather like the more obscure theological debates such as between the infralapsarians and the supralapsarians. Now, there may be some rationality to bringing Bill Gates into a discussion of the Manichean theory. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:49, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

As someone who uses a Mac, and a PC running Windows XP and Linux, I guess that either makes me a pantheist, a panentheist or perhaps one of those atheistical unitarian types who takes scraps from anywhere, without any real metaphysical underpinnings. I tend to think of Linux as a sort of Protestantism, since you spend a lot more time with spartan command lines - with Mac OS X being more like Anglicanism. --Tom Morris 11:09, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

Boy Scouts

Shouldn't it live at Boy Scouts of America, since I believe that's the official designated name of the organization? Also, Scouting could live at it's own disambiguation page as well given that it can mean various things (war role, intelligence, camping/traditional meaning etc). --Robert W King 18:44, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Well, Boy Scouts of America should be linked from Scouting, since the BSA is part of the movement. As for the other meanings - if someone wants to step up, add them to Scouting, and then we could budge the Scouts movement to something better. (To be honest, page naming is not my main concern or forté, so feel free to shunt the articles around so that they make better sense). --Tom Morris 19:00, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Should Comparison_of_Java_and_.NET exist?

Hi Tom, I noticed your repeated comment in the history for Comparison_of_Java_and_.NET on "not sure if this article should exist". A good place to bring up that would be on the article's talk page. I originally wrote that article as a separate entity so that I could link to it from both .NET Framework and Java platform, and I'm interested in your thoughts about it. It would certainly need updating over time as the information might not remain current.Pat Palmer 11:56, 5 July 2008 (CDT)

I do admire some of your definitions.

Semantic web is elegant.

Looking at fascism, I'd appreciate your input on an article that I just created, FUD (deliberately using a redirect rather than the full title). First, I definitely want the opinion of people not from North America; the term is recognized among my Internet engineering colleagues worldwide, but, in all senses, that's an unusual group. Second, I was struggling and failing to show the most pernicious use of FUD, in creating "enemies of the state", the struggle against which is one of the greatest social controls of fascist (and other totalitarian) states. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:44, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

Thanks for archiving

--the Write-a-Thon page. Hope this means you'll join the party when it's Wednesday in your time zone (or "jump the gun", tee hee) Aleta Curry 22:30, 5 August 2008 (CDT)

thanks for tweaking!

Tom, Thanks for cleaning up on Grounds for Sculpture!Pat Palmer 09:19, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

Web, Ajax, etc.

I agree with your comments on Ajax. Now, let me make it abundantly clear I'm a networking, not web interface, specialist. Nevertheless, I've tried to start putting in some background material, such as Domain Object Model, and cross-linking it with Ajax. Also, I put some comments on JSON - as a data interchange format.

This isn't just my computers editor hat speaking; I have to develop some better web development skills. In the meantime, do let me know what networking content you'd like to see; there's so much that it's hard to prioritize.

Howard Howard C. Berkowitz 14:13, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

Thanks, Howard. If you want to learn about front-end development with the DOM and Ajax, I'd highly recommend the books of my friend Jeremy Keith - DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model and Bulletproof Ajax. For a more programmer-oriented introduction I'd suggest Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript. All three teach JavaScript properly, a rare commodity these days.

As for networking topics, I'd love to see a page on mDNSResponder/zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour/Hello/whatever Apple are calling it this week - it's a technology I have a lot of time for.

Over the next few weeks, I'm mostly going to be working on Philosophy Workgroup articles, though I may try and turn out a few stubs and shorties on aspects of Agile development, Ruby, Rails etc. --Tom Morris 14:20, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

DNS is a challenging area, and you raise the key point of level. For example, I did start a Domain Name System article, which is a top-down start to mDNSResponder. I know I need to write about multicast in general. The question, to which I have no clear answer, is whether the effort should be principally top-down, or have a lot of individual articles that are both current and meaningful to specialists.

That's been a problem in my books on ISP engineering. Essentially, book publishing, outside narrow academic circles, is dead for networking, unless the book specifically relates to a job skill. There's enough free content for the specialists. While I've done some writing here about BGP, I've also written about it at book length and still know there's a huge body of art that exists mostly in peoples' heads and mailing lists.

While I deal a lot with addressing, much of DNS is, from my perspective, application stuff. My expertise is paving, traffic direction, and accident investigation on the Information Superhighway: the journey rather than the destination (stops and shudders at the memory of my experience of driving in the UK, with the most significant bits of the street being reversed) Howard C. Berkowitz 15:01, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

I may need to take on more Javascript, as I'll be talking, in an hour or so, to someone with whom I might work; he's got a medical SoaS application, although I don't know the software infrastructure. I have Zakas' Javascript for Web Developers on my shelf, but that's something I got as an author for Wiley. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

DNS

This is a little indirect, but a colleague of mine, User:TJ Evans, has started updating the Internet Protocol version 6 material, which has embarrassed me into doing more. In particular, I've put in a bit about dynamic DNS update -- mostly that it exists. Hopefully, there's someone better qualified than I to discuss DNS and public key infrastructure, but it's on my list if no one else takes it on.Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

A funny sort of gratitude

Thanks, in an odd way, for putting in a Dick Cheney article. In assorted military history articles, I keep feeling guilty about the previously null link to him, and, for that matter, Robert S. McNamara. I have such personal distaste for them that I just haven't been up to writing an article on them to make the links non-null.

While there's a bit of CZ politics involved with cleaning up Vietnam War, it's hard to discuss it without discussing McNamara. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

Thanks!

For the formatting on that oh so famous boy band! Later! Aleta Curry 21:49, 2 September 2008 (CDT)

PGP and related

Thanks for adding some of the legal history to PGP. I think eventually that might develop into a rather long section, with links to quite a few related things. If you're interested in the whole crypto & civil rights & ... set of issues, have a look at FreeSWAN as well. Sandy Harris 11:39, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I really should write something about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, a barmy law here in Britain which allows the Police to require me to hand over my encryption keys or go to prison for two years. --Tom Morris 11:59, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi Tom

You're going to explain why you cut 443 characters from citizen journalism, right? --Larry Sanger 16:07, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Lets go Retro!

Hey Tom--!

Whatever happened to that 1980s Retro banner you promised, huh, huh?? :) Aleta Curry 23:04, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I was planning to do it last night, but went out for a late snack at a diner. Got back about 1am, and quickly rustled something up in The Gimp on my teensy Acer Aspire One laptop. I'm no graphic designer, but I think it's rather fun. Added it to the Write-a-Thon page. Now just got to find something to put up about the 1980s. Time to put all that cartoon-watching and pop cultural engagement to use! --Tom Morris 08:22, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Mill

Hi Tom, how about 'filling out' Mill, then? Would you like some help! Martin Cohen 14:34, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Can't, I'm afraid. Too busy. Too much reading to do. With all the things I'm doing, something has to make way. Citizendium is unfortunately the thing which had to make way. --Tom Morris 21:55, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Understood! - just wanted to check to avoid 'pre-empting you'. I'll put some notes up in the next week , no problems. Martin Cohen 10:56, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

You might like to comment on my concerns about the 'Applied Philosophy' section on the Philosophy page. Martin Cohen

Cults and violence

Hi Tom. Did you just undo your revert of my deletion? [1] My head is spinning ... dizzy ... must sit down. --Ed Poor 18:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I undid your edit where you removed the paragraph about the Branch Davidians from the suicide and violence section. My reasons were simple: the Branch Davidians incident quite clearly was an example of "group suicide or violence", although not exactly in the same way that the Heaven's Gate people were (where it was sucide or violence within the group, where as in Waco it was violence from outside - namely, from the ATF). Then I realised that having a separate section for "group suicide or violence" with just Heaven's Gate and the Branch Davidians made no sense, since we had a section later on called Scandals - where both the Heaven's Gate and Waco paragraphs would slot in quite a bit better.

As an aside, I think that we will probably have to eventually split Religion in the United States to have one article talking about the history and evolution of mainstream religious groups in the US, and one to deal with new religious movements like Heaven's Gate and so on. --Tom Morris 18:29, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

How about Violence and religion - or more specifically Violence and new religions? I know a lot about it, having been shocked in 1980 by the People's Temple episode in Guyana. Media attention and rumors then suggested the Unification Church might end the same way. --Ed Poor 18:40, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Doubletake on edit summary

When I read about removing something from circumcision... Howard C. Berkowitz 22:17, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The whole thing is rather weird. Only 12% of people my age in Britain are circumcised (and the numbers only seem to be dropping). In Scandinavia, it's only 2%. In the US, the rate is over 80%. Do males in Scandinavia end up with dramatically worse health outcomes than those in the US? Cultural traditions sure are weird. --Tom Morris 22:30, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the question should be: do their sexual partners end up with worse health outcomes? Aleta Curry 02:50, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

CZ conventions about numbers

I wouldn't swear to it, Tom, but I'm pretty sure that the CZ convention is to write 19th century, etc., rather than nineteenth. On the same basis that numbers from one to ten are written, and after that they're 11, 12, etc. Or so I think. I could be wrong.... Hayford Peirce 22:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

In which case, I suggest changing the convention. I changed it because it seemed far more sensible to do it that way. --Tom Morris 22:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, I dunno if it's more sensible or not. But if there are 10,000 examples of doing it the other way, and CZ actually *says* somewhere it's supposed to be done that way, then that's how it should be done. Hayford Peirce 22:54, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I can't find anything in CZ except an exhortation to consult various Manuals of Style. In which one can generally find anything one wants if one consults enough of them. Wikipedia, however, does say this: "Centuries are named in figures: (the 5th century CE; 19th‑century painting); when the adjective is hyphenated, consider nineteenth‑century painting, but not when contrasted with painting in the 20th century." But since we're not Wikipedia.... Hayford Peirce 23:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I can probably design a template that will produce properly formatted text, no matter what convention we decide on.

• Like {{century|18}} => Template:Century

Then when we decide words are better than numbers, we just change one template and all instances of using the template change automatically. Or maybe I make an easy way to turn a noun into an adjective.

• Like {{century adj|18}} => Template:Century adj --Ed Poor 19:21, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we need a policy change rather than a technical change. Thanks for the offer. I'm going to suggest when we have time that a few CZ regulars get together, draft a rough style guide and then through a consensus based approach push it through the proposals system. --Tom Morris 21:15, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I proposed precisely that several months ago, in one of the Forums, I believe, and after about three responses it went -- absolutely nowhere. Mine was for a sort of build-it-as-you-go-along model. Ie, I would stick in a bit about modifiers and hyphens because I had just happened to make an edit about them, ie "Science-fiction writers write science fiction." And when "which" should be used instead of "that". Everyone has their own hobbyhorses to stick in, I imagine. Hayford Peirce 21:55, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

The 2 templates I created can be swapped around, if we change policy. I have no preference; I simply don't like going back to change things. I'm also a computer programmer, and so I prefer to make 100 references to a subroutine, function or template - which can then be modified in one place - rather than try to find all 100 references. (It puts me in mind of the Y2K problem or Y2K bug.) --Ed Poor 00:28, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Indenting -- please follow the rules

Hi, Tom,

Please follow the CZ indenting conventions in Talk pages, which are now set out clearly at the top of the page in the blue box. Thanks! Hayford Peirce 15:22, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think I was. I wasn't replying to Howard's statement, I was making a new top-level comment that wasn't specifically responding to anyone's comment, but to the general thrust of the thread. I've been using threaded message boards for over a decade now. If we insist that everything has to be indented a level below the previous post, then we may as well not bother with indenting, since we don't then have a threaded discussion, just a flat one with indented text blocks. (Personally, I think we should get rid of talk pages altogether and replace them with a proper USENET-style threaded discussion board.) --Tom Morris 15:31, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Understood, but it's not USENET. When I make a general comment, I create a new (sub)heading, which is not possible in a mail or news thread. While you and I may be comfortable with threading, many CZ users are not and will not be; I've used threaded message systems for a lot more than one decade.

While it's not explicitly in the rules, and perhaps should be, there is an informal convention of moving back to the left margin with (undent). That's reasonably readable. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:36, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

In the case of the pseudoscience talk page the indenting was screwed up because Howard, Tom, and I were working on it simultaneously. I didn't see Howard's nor Tom's remarks when I saved. --Paul Wormer 15:42, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think my point stands. If we're not going to use indenting for threading, then it seems pointless to indent at all - it just makes it harder to read. I'm not totally sure why we need to bother with undent. It's pretty easy to see it's 'undent'-ed, because it's not indented. I'd suggest we rethink the way talk pages work completely. Have a look at this example page from microformats.org wiki. The discussion on this issues page (microformats.org wiki doesn't use talk pages) is how I imagine an ideal talk page. One of the other things I'd change about talk pages is lack of refactoring. On the original c2 wiki, discussions were frequently refactored - packed together into compressed nuggets to make them more readable. I think Citizendium could really reinvent the humble talk page and make it a lot better than the warzone that is many of the Other Place's talk pages. --Tom Morris 15:46, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

(Edit clash with Tom, that illustrates the problem nicely) I think Paul hits the nail on the head here. Sometimes its hard to know where to add the comment if there is an edit clash. You want to reply to the comment three above but several more have appeared in the meantime. Basically it's a crap system on an active page. High activity also explains why people accidently and unknowingly delete others comments. Chris Day 15:47, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, there was a fairly long discussion about it in one of the Forums a while ago, with a number of contributors, and it appears to me that it was decided that henceforward indents would be the RULE, rather than the GUIDELINE, for Talk pages about articles. And it was left vague about what individuals could do with their OWN Talk pages. For instance, if Tom insists on using some other formatting on his own Talk page, then I don't think anyone else is going to argue with him. But for all the other articles, I think that *everyone* should follow the rules as much as possible -- I realize that there are Editing Conflicts, etc., but it still ought to be reasonably adhered to. Thanks again! Hayford Peirce 16:15, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the above indentation shows my point. My 15:46 post is in response to Howard's 15:36 post. The indentation makes it seem like it's in response to Paul's 15:42 post. But it's not. Paul's 15:42 post is in response to Howard's 15:36 post. I've therefore unindented my 15:46 post to illustrate it's relationship in a threaded hierarchy. --Tom Morris 18:11, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Tom, since this is your user talk page, please feel free to organize it any way you like. For other talk pages, specifically for those attached to articles, please follow the protocols shown in the blue box at the top of the page, and also as elaborated here at CZ:How to use talk pages. Unless I am overruled on this by, say, Larry, I am stating flatly that these are Rules to be followed, not Guidelines to be *maybe* followed. But, as I've said, your own page is your own to do what you want with. Hayford Peirce 19:00, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I kinda like the way Tom does it. There are times when you are not responding to the person just above your post and his method works for me. I think (undent) works to let people know that you are responding to the text just above. The problem is that we can't expect everyone to know one set of rules, so unless we want to bug people about this on a daily basis, I think we should allow some slack. D. Matt Innis 19:35, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Not to get too rabid about it, but the guidance on the edit page does say "Indent beneath the comment you are replying to". I think my interpretation of that text is more in the spirit of how it was intended than the indented-flat-replies interpretation. Even if most people won't know to do it like this, the way I'm doing it is how it is done pretty much everywhere on the Internet. It follows the Principle of Least Surprise. The indented-flat-replies interpretation is surprising, and it actually doesn't allow you to "indent beneath the comment you are replying to", it rather insists that you indent beneath the last comment, even if it's not the comment you are actually replying to. Anyhow, I guess I should stop worrying and write an article for this here Write-a-Thon malarkey. --Tom Morris 20:41, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't disagree with that being the way it is often done. Nevertheless, I received objections from prior Citizens when I did it that way when I first arrived. The "rule" aspect came about when a former participant insisted on top posting and even more bizarre techniques, and it was argued he was merely given a "guideline". My own response, had I been God-Emperor of CZ, would simply to have suggested he have his Next Friend, if he had one, meet mine to arrange our meeting on the Field of Honor, if he had any. (and hope he didn't pick swords. Guns, knives, unarmed combat...fine). Unfortunately, the outcome was to come up with what I agree is a simplistic rule, but it does seem a cultural reality that many people here are not comfortable with the conventions of threaded response. Nevertheless, as you point out, there are other things to do. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:54, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

If I'm not mistaken, there are three questions here:

(1) Is there a rule here, and if so, what is it?

(2) Is the way that the rule was established "constitutional"?

(3) Is the rule sensible?

On the first question, I would say that there is "rule" in the sense that some people have decided to speak harshly if others don't do what a certain statement says--but not in the sense that the Constabulary has taken upon itself the responsibility of ejecting people who don't abide by the statement. I leave it to those who understand the distinction (i.e., not me) to say whether the statement is, therefore, a rule or a guideline.

On (2), I think that this is the sort of minor matter that can be established in an ad hoc way. If the proposal had come up in the proposals system, and I had shunted the proposal where it belonged, I would have made an Ad Hoc Committee for it--precisely the participants on the page where the proposal was being discussed. I agree with all (or most) of you that this is enough to establish that we can speak harshly and bossily to others who aren't doing what a statement says.

On (3), I think the rule as literally stated is not sensible. It says, "Indent beneath the comment you are replying to by using colons :, ::, ::: and so forth as more replies are added." This means that, if we have a conversation that involves 20 replies, it literally implies that the 20th person will have to use 20 :'s, which is silly.

The practice I've often (not strictly) adhered to, and which I would encourage in others, has these parts:

• Append your replies either to the bottom, or indented immediately beneath the comment you are replying to. Don't put your comments above everyone else's, except in certain special cases.

• Indent (or unindent) your comment so it is neither flush with the comment above or (if there is one) the one below it.

• Don't insert your comment within someone else's comments (what is called "commenting inline"), even if you indent your comments. That is considered Rude.

• Of course, always sign your comment. --Larry Sanger 21:33, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I thought that the blue box above ALSO said that when the number of indents was getting out of hand (like the 20 indents Larry mentions) that one could start over again, maybe by prefacing the new line with "(reindent)" or some such. Maybe that's only on the CZ:How to Use Talk Page. If so, it *should* be in the blue box. As for how the "rule" came about, it was discussed in various places by various people, diverse hands contributed to the Help page, Milton (I believe) created the blue box with input from others, and then suddenly it was implemented. Certainly it *wouldn't* have been implemented if anyone had objected very strenuously or even at all. Hayford Peirce 22:19, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Undenting, I think, is a form of orthodontia. I think. Or maybe it's normal for bunnywabbits. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:28, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

personal response from Melissa Newman

Tom, I wanted to respond to you personally. First, I want you to understand that I have no desire or intention, direct or indirect, of doing anything that should affect the main citizendium site articles (non-student). Second, I wanted to give you some background about myself. I decided to homeschool my children about 4 years ago, so learning what Wikipedia had and did not have was a major part of that. For a very long time, I was under the impression that Wikipedia was good for what is it was. I would use it to get a sense of the terminology for a topic and the images were fantastic. Where else could I go to get 100 images of elephants to choose from? I understood the problems of the site. The content was not reliable, especially with current event topics. But at the time, the positives outweighed the negatives.

About 3 months ago it was pointed out to me the following article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/ejaculation

I personally don't think that belongs on a public website, but it is a free country and there is freedom of speech. I started with the basics. I told Vista parental controls that I wanted to filter "sex education" as well as other related content. The Vista Parental controls did not work, and Vista does not allow any way to customize things. I then setup OpenDNS. This filter whole websites with the ability to provide whitelist and blacklists, but it does not work for sites like Wikipedia.

I then looked at CYBERsitter. The concept of the program is very good, but again, it does not work with Wikipedia out of the box. I could setup keywords, but even that did not work correctly. It gets to the point that the user puts in so many keywords that using the program while generally wanting to talk about a topic issue becomes unmanageable. The bottom line is that it does not work.

A bunch of parents of trying to create a Jr. Wikipedia called kidpedia and other names, but due to lack of name recognition and other factors they are not very successful.

I looked at http://simple.wikipedia.org. That site says on its main page that it is for children and ESL adults, but the content is not for children. Again, look at this article:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/w/ejaculation

Does that really belong in a student encyclopedia? If those images were in a movie, the movie would have a rating of NC-17. But the problem is that simple wikipedia is being run by a bunch of teenage boys.

But the problem is not just that. Look at the images in the following categories on http://commons.wikipedia.org

category:nudity
category:naked children
category:naked women
cateogry:naked men

In the second one, who could create that category? Who would post images to that category? Who would look for images under that category name? Are you starting to get a sense of what my main issue is?

The question than became how to handle the situation. I tried to talk to MediaWiki, but their attitude is "We believe in free speech with no censorship. If you don't like our site, don't use it." It is a valid position, and they have the right to state it. The problem is that they really do have a great selection of images.

So I came up with another solution. I was going to install MediWiki on a flash drive with articles loaded that contained info that would be appropriate for students. Actually, I was going to create the template of articles, but not the content -- do the technical labor, but leave the content to the end user.

I installed MediaWiki, MySQL, PHP, and Apache on a flash drive. I setup the configurations to have a main namespace and two custom namespaces (one for each of my children). I also set it up to be able to access Wikipedia images. I had looked into the downloading the images in a block, but Wikipedia does not allow that. You can do it manually, but not through electronic means. They really want people to link to their images. The code is setup that way, and it works wonderfully.

Until two weeks ago, when I found Citizendium, that was the path that I was taking -- creating a personal wikipedia on a flashdrive that I was going to sell to other homeschooling parents. Then I found Citizendium.

When I found this site, I already knew what I thought the best way to setup a student encyclopedia within another site like Wikipedia should be -- a separate namespace. It would be within the same database, but be psychologically be in its own space -- separate, but not separate. I did not state it at the beginning, because I am not an editor and I am not a constable. So I presented the Workgroup solution, which is similar to the Portal concept on Wikipedia. It seemed like it would handle the issues without stepping on too many toes in the main article section.

When Larry Sanger and a few others outright said that the Student articles should be in their own space, they were stating what I wanted to do from the very beginning, but felt uncomfortable stating myself. Since Larry Sanger is the Editor-in-chief I really that he can help get the separate namespace setup.

If the student version can get its own namespace, then all other ideas I said about content tags, etc. become a non-issue. It will simple be filter out the main articles and only access the student ones or access the whole site. The filtering becomes one line, very simple to implement. Does Citizendium have to implement it? Not really, because once the filtering rules are understood, all student pages begin "student:", a third party product can easily take over. Nobody is affected unless you own the third party product.

As for the content in the student pages, that should be decided by the workgroups for the student pages. There will have to be workgroups for the student part.

StudentWorkgroup
StudentPreschoolWorkgroup
StudentLowerElementaryWorkgroup
StudentUpperElementaryWorkgroup
StudentHighSchoolWorkgroup

There will also be one for the different subject areas that will generally follow traditional school subjects:

StudentLanguageArtsWorkgroup
StudentMathWorkgroup
StudentScienceWorkgroup
StudentSocialStudiesWorkgroup
StudentTechnologyWorkgroup
StudentCareerCounselorWorkgroup
StudentLifeSkillsWorkgroup
StudentHealthSciencesWorkgroup

All of the issues that I had brought up previously should be handled by the appropriate workgroups that will be in charge of not only the content, but making sure that the needs of the different age students are met. Since they are the editors of those pages, they would be the best group of people to decide what is and what is not appropriate to put on a given page.

I hope that this gives you enough information that my intention is not do anything to change the main article pages, but to solve the issue of how children and adults can co-exist on Citizendium without stepping on each others toes.

Apologies for jumping in here. Yes, if the access is on the granularity of childrens' namespace only, many problems clear up if that namespace is whitelisted and everything else is blacklisted. I do, however, have one concern:

All of the issues that I had brought up previously should be handled by the appropriate workgroups that will be in charge of not only the content, but making sure that the needs of the different age students are met. Since they are the editors of those pages, they would be the best group of people to decide what is and what is not appropriate to put on a given page.

There seems an assumption here that the editors of a workgroup:

• Feel qualified in judging what subject material, in their workgroup, is child-appropriate
• Are interested in making such determinations Melissa Newman 21:04, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe either are true. Some editors may be willing to make such determinations, but I do not consider it fair to assume all editors will do so, or if the workgroups, which are having enough trouble getting organized on general material, also have to take on the issues of supporting a childrens' encyclopedia. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:20, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

If *I* were an editor, which, thank goodness, I'm not, *I* certainly wouldn't feel that I was qualified to judge. Nor, of course, would I want to. I have no idea at all what the actual editors here at CZ feel about it. Hayford Peirce 22:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Name

Just some non-serious randomness, but every time I see your name, I think of Tom (T.V.) Morris formerly of Univ of Notre Dame! Cheers! Christopher M. Roussel 15:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Underground

Thanks for your kind message! My ultimate intention is to do articles on all of the London Underground lines; presently I'm about half way through trying to travel the entire system, which may seem sad, but it's very interesting. I'll also do articles for the DLR and Croydon Tramlink. It's also my plan to have articles for all of the towns, cities and counties that I'm familiar enough with. So far as you saw I've done Leicester, Milton Keynes, Stafford and so on, but there are many more to do! By the way, nature gave you eight fingers and two thumbs! But that's my point on that subject really, I'm fine with people using metric, I just want to be able to use FPS alongside. Midland Main Line is the second article I've done on the radial main lines of the UK after West Coast Main Line - I'll get around to the rest before long, probably do the Chiltern line next. Tom F Walker 07:29, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Beowulf in Bermuda

I'm worried you will next post on a multiprocessing scheme for the Bermuda Triangle. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:57, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Requested articles?

I wasn't quite sure what you had in mind by "refactoring". Just as one example, there's a request for "ship commissioning and decommmissioning" , which was present as "ship commissioning" under Pages Wanted and I wrote. Can we reconcile the two lists? Some of the terms in the wanted pages list also could be better chosen. Howard C. Berkowitz 09:08, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

• I've written up a long list of the plans I have - but then I couldn't get access to CZ. The plans I have are on CZ Talk:Requested Articles now. –Tom Morris 09:57, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Is the appropriate comment:

Congratulations, Master? Howard C. Berkowitz 21:39, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

• Thank you. I got on the train, opened up my e-mail and had a nice surprise. With distinction too. I can stay in academia! Woohoo! –Tom Morris 23:11, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Cal Thomas

I'm puzzled why you removed details from the lemma definition; that someone is the most widely syndicated columnist in the U.S. seems significant to me. --Howard C. Berkowitz 19:51, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Just seemed clumsy - the detail can be in the article. Restore it if you like. The way it was phrased seemed strange to me, that's all. –Tom Morris 20:01, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Are you in Britain

If so and if you like music check out Jamie Cullum -- my son and I love his music; he's dubbed Sinatra in Sneakers.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 00:57, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Yep, I'm in East Sussex. And, yes, I've heard of Cullum. Got a few bits and pieces on my iPod by him. --Tom Morris 01:25, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

On The Pursuit my favorites are; You & me are gone; Wheels; Don't stop the music; Just One of those things; Mix Tape; Gran Torino. Amazing stuff. --Thomas Wright Sulcer 05:21, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Interest groups

Tom, were you planning to work on the interest groups from which you are removing the Eduzendium notice? Some have errors. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:17, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

I am scanning over the formatting and removing the problems. If they have content errors, that needs to be fixed before approval, not before removal of Eduzendium warnings, so far as I can tell. –Tom Morris 23:20, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

In no official way, I have to disagree. Eduzendium articles are expected to be more fragile than the regular space, and have not been subject to any sort of community review -- taking them out of Eduzendium is not the same as the Approval process. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:43, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Frankfurt School

I changed the article a bit. I did not want to go into to much detail in the article, but the difference between the orthodox Marxist 1923 Institute (Richard Sorge!) and the later fmous Horkheimer affair should be mentioned.--Ralf Heinritz 08:31, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Go for it. My knowledge of the Frankfurt School is limited to reading some Adorno. –Tom Morris 10:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

I was planning to do an article about Jurgen Habermas one of these days but I did one about The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere his book; Habermas emerged out of the Frankfurt School I think.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 20:23, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Recovering libertarianism and assorted nuttiness

On Talk:Willis Carto, Howard asked why I am interested in this kind of stuff. I started writing and it became a personal thing. I thought it'd be better here so as not to clutter up the article talk page.

I read up on Willis Carto because I have a somewhat bizarre interest in extremism - fuelled no doubt by Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend shows where he hangs around with the nuttier subcultures in the US (before coming back to the UK to meet various equally strange celebrities including Neil and Christine Hamilton, Jimmy Saville and Max Clifford). I started clicking around after reading about the arrest of the Hutaree Christian militia guys who were planning to kill cops, and the Oath Takers, the uniform (ie. military and law enforcement) branch of the Tea Party movement.

One of the claims I saw made by a supporter of both movements was that they were only keeping up a tradition that goes back to the time of the Founders. Which is obviously untrue. The Hutaree and the Oath Takers are pretty much linked to the previous generation of nutty militia types which last flourished under Clinton and gave the world Timothy McVeigh. There have been extremist militia-like movements before the 90s and Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City, but there is obviously no link between them and the Revolutionaries. Appealing to the Founding Fathers is really masking their true connection: firstly to the McVeigh guys in the 90s, then back to guys like Carto and The Spectator, the American Free Press.

Part of my interest is because I was, for a brief period, one of the small gang of libertarian Ron Paul types here in London (albeit without the racist, conspiracy theory and pseudolaw stuff like tax denial that plenty of Libertarians are into - not being in the US somewhat prevents one from having a strong opinion on the facts of federal income tax even if one does have strong opinions about the oughts). I truly baffled all my friends and family for a few years before rediscovering the joys of a mixed economy and accepting that actually having a government isn't really such a terrible thing. Especially if you get ill. Since then, I've been interested in an academic manner in libertarianism and populist movements: in the interaction between the intellectuals and the ordinary protestors (on the right, think of Hayek or William F. Buckley; on the left, Chomsky or the Left Bank intellectuals in '68), in the self-consistent logic of one's position, in how ideologies spread.

What changed? Well, partly, I grew up a bit. Partly it was the banking crisis. But also, it was interesting to see how things were changing. Fellow UK libertarians - not exactly a native ideology, like Thatcherism and Clinton-style third-way-ism, libertarianism is something we import from the US - became split between parties and they became split on things I wasn't bothered by. Many became Eurosceptics, and I'm firmly pro-Europe. I don't buy - even with my former libertarian glasses on - the idea that somehow local government is all sugar and sweetness compared to national (Whitehall) or pan-national government (Brusells, Strasbourg). The libertarians tended to get very irritated about trivialities like the so-called Metric Marytrs case, but didn't see the great increase in freedom (in both a positive and negative sense) that Europe brought - one could just pick up one's stuff and move to any nation in the Union, and live and work without having to change national citizenship or apply for residency visas or permits or whatever. The libertarians supported the strongly Eurosceptical UKIP party, which wanted to close the borders, pull us further away from Europe and restrict immigration. They aren't racist or nativist, but they weren't exactly my cup of tea. They have also come to embrace climate change denial. So, no thanks on that.

I certainly have a lot of affection for my libertarian days: I do appreciate the logic of it, and the commitment to a certain kind of moral and political consistency and deductive, a priori reasoning. It also caused me to strongly doubt social contract theories, and I still doubt the Hobbesian or Lockean attempts at social contracts - but I find John Rawls' A Theory of Justice convincing. I kind of feel like some of those disenchanted Communists and Marxists - the anarcho-capitalist 'Libertopia' still feels like it could be real, and the idea of it has a certain kind of theoretical beauty in the stark beauty of it.

What I find very sad though is how these things get bundled. I didn't want my libertarianism to get me bundled along with the Eurosceptics and the anti-immigrants, but when I look stateside, I see people who - on all external apperances - thought very similarly to how I did getting sucked into all sorts of barminess: whether it is implicit racism, stuff like the tax protestor pseudolaw stuff (which just exposes one huge lack of is-ought distinction - just because you would like it to be true that one doesn't have to pay taxes doesn't mean that one can come up with crackpot theories to explain how you really don't have to pay taxes), the cult of Sarah Palin, and now with Obama in power, an absurd joining together of small government libertarianism with fake grassroot campaigns for big corporate powers (being libertarian never meant defending health insurance companies or the right to rip off sick people), the religious right, the Birthers, conspiracy theories (9-11 Truthers are just the start) and so on.

A lot of this stuff seems to inherit the paranoid style as described by Richard Hofstadter. This is a profoundly interesting thing from this side of the Atlantic. However mild Obama's reforms are, the paranoid folk can't see anything other than demonic forces. I mean, imagine Sigmund Freud with CNN and Twitter: with the constant drip-cycle of the news cycle and fellow nutty people to bounce ideas off, the barminess of the ideas have just been growing into an avalanche of paranoia. Everything Obama does - whether it is bowing to the Japanese or agreeing to offshore drilling (one of McCain's primary policy planks) - is part of a grand scheme by the secret Communist Marxist Socialist Fascist Democrats. Oh, what a book could be written about this stuff.

That about explains it. –Tom Morris 01:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough -- "I certainly have a lot of affection for my libertarian days" is something that's very familiar. When I was about 17, I stayed up for nearly 48 hours reading Atlas Shrugged.. I met my first wife at a Young Republican party, and she went to dinner with me because I was the only person there (1968 or so) that could define libertarianism.

Personally, I became convinced that if there were to be dictatorship in the U.S., it would come from exploitation of the paranoid style -- Coughlin and McCarthy and others came closer than I like. I became a serious student of Naziism to understand how they came to power and what might have prevented them. Now, with far more advanced communications systems, demagoguery takes a new turn.

Now, I'm not personally opposed to responsible gun ownership. Nevertheless, I get frustrated with friends that think that their guns are the only things preventing a government takeover. They cite gun confiscation in Nazi Germany, yet, when I examined this with social scientists and Army Special Forces types, the idea of resistance just wasn't present; it took rare conditions even in the death camps. If, however, there was some government takeover here, I wouldn't be popping away with a rifle -- and I am a decent shot -- I'd be hacking my way into command and control systems.

I like the idea of Citizendium being a good, accurate resource. In the various articles on coercive interrogation and torture, I hope there's adequate evidence that it simply doesn't work as a means of getting reliable information, not because it's morally offensive to lib'ruls. Where should we go from here? Howard C. Berkowitz 01:41, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

OK, there's now a separate The Paranoid Style in American Politics article. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:45, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Philosophy of mathematics

Tom, would you be interested to write some article about a philosophical topic related to mathematics. E.g., "Set theory (philosophy of mathemaics)" or "Set theory (philosophy)", or something else, like existence, infinity, ... ? --Peter Schmitt 14:34, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I wrote a long response to this on my netbook which promptly crashed!

I'd like for there to be more articles on philosophy of mathematics, but I'm not best qualified to write them - my interests are in metaphysics, and my exposure to philosophy of mathematics is pretty minimal and self-directed. A lot of understanding of things like set theory and so on seemed to be expected in order to follow some of the arguments in metaphysics, so I ended up having to teach myself large chunks of that stuff in order to follow the arguments. I'll try and contribute more, but I'm not an expert. –Tom Morris 12:17, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Cryptography stuff

You commented on & added text to cryptography, which is now approved. That text is now in politics of cryptography, an article that needs more work. Do you have more to contribute there?

There are various other articles on techno-political topics (cypherpunk, FreeSWAN, ...) and many purely technical ones (stream cipher, cryptanalysis, ...) that also need contributions or comment. Sandy Harris 11:00, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Sandy. I'll try and edit cypherpunk soon - there's lots to write about from things like The Hacker Crackdown and cultural and political stuff around crypto. –Tom Morris 12:19, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

COBRA (non-reptilian, non-object oriented)

Some time ago, you asked if I could do something on the British COBRA (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=User_talk:Howard_C._Berkowitz&diff=cur#Any_chance_of_an_article_on_COBRA.3F). Unfortunately, I know more about the reptile, and probably a little less about the object broker. Nevertheless, I have set up CZ: Emergency management Subgroup, which addresses the inherently interdisciplinary problem of such topics, and perhaps we might start on it. Alternatively, I can comment in some detail on the varied U.S. operational organizations, albeit with a few areas where I'll speak not due to past classified access.

I'm very cautious about setting up a Terrorism Subgroup, as there's so much emotion and political rhetoric associated with that -- the current Approved article is, in my opinion, awful. Perhaps terrorism might better be under an Insurgency Subgroup; virtually all terror has been associated with insurgency, other than nihilists of the past. Self-radicalization is making the taxonomy more complex -- is a singleton self-radicalized terrorist opposed to a government an insurgent? I think so. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:41, 7 June 2010 (UTC)