User talk:AndrewBuck

Hello fellow Wikipedians :) AndrewBuck 21:41, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Torrent project impact assessment

Metrics on our project performance are pretty hard to come up with, but I have taken a run at it. If your BitTorrent client keep tracks of file-specific accumulated upload, please tell it here. -- Paleorthid 16:20, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Finale

Ciao! Thanks for your good edits at Finale Ligure. Just a note: for the references/footnotes, the {{reflist}} template is now standard and easier. Bye and good work. --Attilios 10:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

World Gazetteer

Hi Andrew,

you've been updating population data on Nigerian states and cities lately. You refer to World Gazetter, but I wonder whether World Gazetter can be trusted. All of its figures are collected by one single man (the owner himself). He collects them in his spare time. He doesn't name his sources.^[1]

Nigeria's population figures are highly controversial. The results of the 2006 census are rejected by many. The federal government for instance now gives a population of 9.1 million for Lagos State, the Lagos State government gives 17.5 million.^[2] The federal government now gives a population of 1.4 million for the Federal Capital Territory, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, though, gives 6 million.^[3]

So where does World Gazetteer get its figures (11.159.454 for Lagos State and 693.261 for the Federal Capital Territory)^[4] from? Are they older and even more controversial figures (1991 census?) still being extrapolated? - Little do we know. And spreading them as if we knew much more makes me feel uneasy. What do you think? --Ankimai 18:01, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

You raise an interesting point, my primary concern is just getting numbers into the coor template tags for the geographical coordinates project so the accuracy of the data wasn't too much of a concern, having the populations at least roughly correct allows layering to work in things like google earth which uses a database dump of wikipedia as one source of city informatin. Even having cities sorted into 2 groups makes the rendering of maps much faster, so spot on accuracy is not too important just general size, however the article itself should have as good of a figure as we can provide. I had noticed that there seems to be a lot of discrepancy between various sources. I had been citing the gazetteer simply for consistancy because they have figures for just about everywhere. I was trying to think of a way to list population and source information in the text of the article from multiple sources, I was thinking something like this...

Population estimates for Blah vary, some notable examples are 1,123 (1991 cen),^[5] 1,564 (2007 est).^[6]

but I dont know if this would be too distracting. Questions remaining to be answered what other sources would be good to use, would the 1991 census data be better than the 2007 estimate, is it safe to compare census data with FallingRain.com which lists the number of people within a 7km radius of the point given as the city? I think the best thing to do would be to develop some efficient way of listing numerous sources, possibly different methods, side by side so the reader can decide what to use as the towns population. Maybe some form of an infobox, or a modification of one of the infoboxes already in use. -AndrewBuck 21:37, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I could not (and still can't) come up with an idea how to solve the problem, but I could at least have said that. - In the meantime, a provisional breakdown of the Nigerian census has been published. It doesn't make things much easier, though. Now we have population figures for Local Government Areas and are sort of free to decide which of them make up the city. Nigerian sources feel free, too. The city of Onitsha for example has a population of 261.604 according to the census breakdown, of 600.000 according to the Daily Sun, April 22, 2007, of one-million-odd according to Nigerian Monthly, June 2005, of more than 1.5 million people according to the Nigerian Tribune (Mon. 29th January 2007, not online), of about three million according to the Guardian, Tuesday, July 04, 2006 and of about 6 million according to the Anambra State government (in 2005). So what are we to make of this? I'm lost. Ankimai 19:38, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

All I can say is wow. I Didn't think it was even possible for the population numbers to vary over an entire order of magnitude. I haven't been working on the population stuff recently so I haven't given it much more thought but I still think the best way is to list as many different sources as possible for each place, at least where they are so disputed. In my opinion the fact that the population is disputed is more of a significant fact than the number itself. -AndrewBuck 03:18, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

References

Reeds and rushes

I notice that you disambiguated a couple of links on Long Mynd to point to Phragmites. This is clearly false. In common with all upland heaths in Britain, it is rushes (Juncus) which are plentiful there, and not tall water plants. There is much confusion between reeds and rushes, and it could even be argued that there is now a degree of synonymy between the two words. Either way, is it likely that any other of the links you have disambiguated should not be pointing to Phragmites? I think it's worth looking into. --Stemonitis 07:16, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

---The remainder of this discussion was carried out at User talk:Stemonitis, I reposted it here for clarity---

I disambiguated all of the plant uses of reed to Phragmites because that one is referred to as the "common reed" and has a link in the first sentence to the disambig page for the various species of reed. I'm not really sure what else to do. If you think it would be a good idea I can go back through and revert the disambig edits that went to that page and leave them for others to disambiguate more accurately. -AndrewBuck 21:27, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure about reverting them all, but it might be worth checking through them. Phragmites only occurs in standing water, so any articles about heaths or other upland habitats are not talking about Phragmites. How many articles are we talking about? --Stemonitis 06:23, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I was working from the this at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links, there were 113 pages that linked to Reed which is a disambig page. Of them probably 70 or so referred to plants, mostly along riverbanks, lakes etc. As I mentioned above I sent anything referring to a plant to Phragmites because of the link in its lead sentence. If you give me good criteria for how to handle them I would be happy to go through the list, I did them all at the same time so my contributions page would make this easy, and check each occurrence against your criteria. I am a physics student, not a biologist, so I'm not sure what to do on my own thats, why I suggested the revert, but like I said with some guidelines I could check them. -AndrewBuck 07:36, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

If it's only that many, then I'll do it myself. For rivers and lakes it could conceivably be either Juncus or Phragmites, and there's nothing we can do about that, but anything growing on a hillside is much more likely to be Juncus than Phragmites (as is anything under about 2 m tall). --Stemonitis 07:39, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've been through the changes you made, and there were only a few obvious mistakes. Lots of them I'm not sure whether they really mean Phragmites, but that's the fault of whoever wrote it. It turned out not to be as big a problem as I'd feared. --Stemonitis 07:58, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for checking through them. I spent a fair amount of time before I started the list trying to figure out what to do with all those plant related ones and thats the decision I came to. In the future I'll probably just leave them pointing at the disambig page if I'm not sure or try to find an expert on the subject to assist me. I'm going to put a copy of this dialogue on my talk page to go with your initial comment, feel free to delete this here if you would like. Thanks again for your help. -AndrewBuck 08:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Extremely useful image

SVG Help

Mean anomaly

Image:Cursive.svg listed for deletion

Orbit Diagram for Apollo 13 page

Ethanol fuel diff (rogue bot) (dalek)

Gravity turn: excellent!

my gravity turn changes

You're welcome. I just tightened the language, that's all.

I'm still trying to fully understand the gravity turn myself. Is the angle of attack exactly zero, or is it just very small? The launcher is flying a curved path through stationary air so the wind would come not quite directly off the nose of the rocket, right? Karn (talk) 07:38, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

"The launcher is flying a curved path through stationary air so the wind would come not quite directly off the nose of the rocket, right?" that's an interesting point actually. The path is curved but it is curved over a very long distance and so if you were aboard the rocket the effect with the air you describe would be very small. Also the shorter the rocket is relative to the path length the less this effect will be. It's just like the surface of the Earth, it looks flat until you try to build something several miles long that is straight, as in what a laser would tell you, and level as in what a bubble level would tell you. In reality of course no real rocket ever flies with perfectly zero angle of attack either as they often try to do a bit of steering to keep the error in the orbit small. -AndrewBuck (talk) 13:16, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, that's pretty much what I thought. BTW, I see the term "gravity turn" applied both to launch/landing trajectories and to what are normally called "gravity assists", hyperbolic trajectories that don't contact the planet. It's true that both use gravity to turn the path of a spacecraft, but isn't it confusing to apply the same term to what in practice are very different things? Should the term "gravity turn" be limited only to launches and landings? Karn (talk) 02:25, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Some of the literature uses gravity turn in conjunction with the gravity assists so I included that aspect in the article. I did think it could possibly be confusing and it can be reworded or taken out, as it isn't really important for an understanding of what a gravity turn really is. The launch/landing aspect of it is by far the more commonly used use of the name. -AndrewBuck (talk) 05:26, 26 February 2009 (UTC)