User talk:Ashill

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Please leave me messages here. I will respond where the message was left to avoid fragmenting discussions, and I will watch talk pages where I leave messages for a few days. -Alex

Current status: travel; I may or may not respond to messages. ASHill (talk | contribs) 03:19, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Contents 1 Okajima 2 Sirius 3 Dashes on Planet 4 Thank you 5 Good call 6 Is Formation and evolution... GA worthy? 7 Citation 8 Logan Airport 9 I was thinking that too. 10 Barnstar 11 I just wanted to say... 12 Re:Mis-identified vandalism 13 So, do you want to go to FAC now? 14 Red dwarf stars 15 Stellar evolution and Sun 16 Formation and evolution of the Solar System

[edit] Okajima

I thought I had switched that before when User:Yanksox notified me.

Thanks. I had forgotten to change it in both places.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 18:36, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sirius

Thanks for the luminosity bit. I placed it in the body of text as per MOS - can you get or have you got a ref for it? Much apprecaited. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:04, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

The 25 solar luminosities number I used is from the sidebar of the Sirius page; I added no new information, but I'll copy the reference over. Ashill (talk) 00:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I think Spacepotato beat you to it. thanks anyway. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:13, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Dashes on Planet

I see that you've converted a couple of spaced en-dashes to spaced em-dashes in Planet. Wikipedia has two possible standards for these dashes unspaced em-dashes, or spaced en-dashes (spaced em-dashes are incorrect). Since the article uses British English (e.g. the spelling of "neighbourhood"), I feel that spaced en-dashes are better, since that's the more common style in UK scientific literature. Bluap (talk) 21:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

OK. I'd never noted en-dashes used in place of em-dashes before (and I'm not terribly wild about the form—it goes against everything I learned in middle school), but that's fine by me, as long as the article's consistent (which it wasn't before—some dashes were spaced, some not). I am American, FWIW. Ashill (talk) 22:37, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you

Hi, Alex, I'd like to thank you for the writing the caption under my image of Parallax.--Mbz1 (talk) 23:47, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Good call

Clever solution to the Westover/Hartford issue. Calitorp (talk) 20:11, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I think the current version probably represents a decent consensus; sorry if this got a bit rancorous. ASHill (talk) 21:06, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Is Formation and evolution... GA worthy?

I've been trying to get this article listed in the Solar System FT for over a year, and never can get it good enough. I tried going for GA once, and was shot down. So now I'd like an opinion before trying again. Serendi^podous 17:06, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

In my glance through it, it looks like it probably is, but I haven't read it carefully. I'll try to read it this afternoon/evening (North American time) and give a more thorough opinion. ASHill (talk) 17:13, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

See Talk:Formation and evolution of the Solar System for my comments. ASHill (talk) 21:40, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Re: galactic evolution. The two sources at the end source the entire paragraph. I know this because I wrote the paragraph and I used those two sources to write it. If you feel the sources would be better duplicated sentence by sentence, fair enough, but I thought you should know that. 22:07, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, sure enough. My problem is that there are several additional citations in the middle of the paragraph that provide ancillary information about the term but don't state the fact, so the citation is unclear.

I think having the two good sources you used (Cain 2007 and Cox and Loeb 2007) at the end of the paragraph is the best way to go. Do you think the other three citations in the paragraph should be deleted, changed in someway to clarify the source, kept as they are, or another option? ASHill (talk) 22:14, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I went ahead and chose option (a); feel free to change if you feel prefer. ASHill (talk) 22:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry. I should bookmark your talk page. Anyway, yes, I agree. Serendi^podous 07:39, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citation

I've been noticing that all of a sudden the level of citation demanded for FA and GA class articles has smashed through the ceiling. I never had to worry about such deep levels of citation before, and I have over 11 FAs to my name. What happened? Did Wikipedia suddenly become a respected academic resource when I wasn't looking? Serendi^podous 08:42, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't know; I haven't brought anything to FA except for minor contributions. Solar System formation is close (maybe already there) to GA, although I think the "Issues with the nebular hypothesis" section is weaker than the rest of the article. The article is certainly much improved over where it was for the last review. You want to go for it? Hell, how far do you think it is from FA?

I am an academic, so I may be emblematic of the trend, if there is one. ;) It's entirely possible that I'm more finnicky about refs than is required to pass GA, but that doesn't mean it's bad to do anyway. I've spent a lot of time finding dead links that were posted as citations with no further identifying information, which is more of a pain in the butt than giving a full citation the first time around. ASHill (talk) 14:03, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Can I say thank you for sticking with FAETSS? I don't usually get help of this quality on this article, which has been a pain in my side for years. I'm not a scientist, so it is comforting to know someone with a solid background is around to keep things straight. Serendi^podous 17:55, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Do you still feel the Moons section needs to be expanded? Serendi^podous 07:21, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I expanded it by a sentence or two, but I think it's OK on rereading it. ASHill (talk) 18:53, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

And there I was, thinking I was being so clever, going over to Microsoft Word and hitting "replace all". Oh well. We live and learn. Thanks for spotting that. Serendi^podous 14:02, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I hear you. I did a search and replace in TextWrangler, checking each of its suggestions. (You also changed Colorado to Colourado, which I found particularly amusing.) ;) ASHill (talk) 14:04, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll pretend I didn't read that :-) Anyway, I've gone over the article a few times and while it will need some work before it gets to FA, I think it is ready for a GA. What do you think? Serendi^podous 21:59, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Enjoy your holiday; don't stress unduly on my account. Have fun. I'll take it from here. :-) Serendi^podous 15:57, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Logan Airport

Gah! You beat me to it (the former airlines list cite request). I was searching for the appropriate template and when I found it I went to the page and you had already done it. I agree btw. Thanks! Neo16287 (talk) 15:51, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Took me a while to find the right template too. I'll give it a few days for someone to find a source before deleting the material (even though I'm pretty sure it's at least mostly right). It would probably be more appropriate in the prose in the history section anyway. ASHill (talk) 17:05, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Agree. My airline's bag office is in the old part of Terminal E, and we have an old sign hanging there from when it was the main part of the terminal, The names are covered in duct tape, but you can see the outlines of a few airlines (including TAP, Canadian and Olympic). Nostalgic, but yeah, could use a cite! Neo16287 (talk) 19:04, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] I was thinking that too.

I also think that I may include a history of solar system end hypotheses, if I can find any. Serendi^podous 15:14, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

What the article needs now, which isn't really addressed in the Woolfson article, is an explanation of how Prentice's reformulation of the Laplacian model became the standard theory for Solar System formation. Since Woolfson appears to espouse another view, he doesn't really go into that. Serendi^podous 15:39, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I must admit to only having skimmed Woolfson so far. However, the 1978 date currently in the article for the revival of the nebular hypothesis seems much too recent to me (although I may be wrong). A quick look finds that Boss (1989) cites work dating back to 1943 on angular momentum transport in the Solar nebula. However, this isn't a synthesis with a historical perspective. ASHill (talk)

I should clarify here that that the Prentice's theory—Modern Laplacian Model has nothing to do with the modern widely accepted theory of planet and star formation, which is called in the same article Solar Nebular Disk Model (SNDM). The latter is only a distance heir of the original Laplacian Model. Prentice actually thinks that planets formed from rings (or toruses) of material that separated from the contracting Sun. They should have carried out the accessive momentun. However his model is not especially popular now. Prentice's theory says nothing about accretion disks and provides wrong explanation for the classical T Tauri star's activity, which, as now known, is connected to accretion and not to any intrisinc activity. In addition, the rings, even if formed, would probably disperse without collapsing into planets (see p.12). So the Nebular Hypothesis article is about SNDM, not about Pretince's theory. The name Modern Laplacian Model is actually misleading. Ruslik (talk) 07:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Barnstar

		The E=mc² Barnstar
		I don't normally give these out for GAs, and, strictly speaking, this isn't a GA yet; more of a promissory GA in anticipation of future completion, but, as I am immensely grateful for your help in getting through the nightmare that has been Formation and evolution of the Solar System, I think you deserve one. Serendipodous 13:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] I just wanted to say...

That I meant to put a smiley face after my last edit summary. It reads a lot more nastily than it was intended. Sorry. :) Serendi^podous 14:13, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Not a problem (no offense taken), but thanks for the note. I was about to start a discussion of whether I should undo the switch to scientific notation; is that unnecessary? :) ASHill (talk | contribs) 14:19, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

It might just be a personal issue for me. I'm a bit dyslexic (I think), so, as you may have noticed, I find scientific notation perennially confusing. Personally, I can see the value of scientific notation for numbers higher than say, 100 trillion, but for numbers that people are familiar with, I think spelling them out is simpler for non-scientists to grasp. Ruslik, being a scientist, tends to put everything (even "1000") into scientific notation, and I tend to pull him back on that. Of course, scientific notation is easier to multiply and divide, so it makes perfect scientific sense to express all numbers in it, but when you're just trying to state a number, I don't think it necessary. But that's just me. Serendi^podous 15:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Being an astronomer, I have to resist the tendency to skip past scientific notation altogether and just use logarithms, so I may not be the best person to ask. Hell, I'll put 1 in scientific notation in some contexts. :) In teaching astronomy, I question how much people really are familiar with (i. e. actually understand) numbers as small as 1000, but it's certainly true that people are far more familiar with the term million than 10⁶. There are certainly arguments for both, and I don't feel strongly about it. ASHill (talk | contribs) 15:13, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Hell, I'll put 1 in scientific notation in some contexts. :)

See, that's what I don't get; isn't that just writing two extra zeroes? :) Serendi^podous 15:45, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

In some contexts, like comparing 10⁰ to 10 ^{− 12}; easy to see that the difference is 12 orders of magnitude. There may have been some self-satire in that comment, though. ASHill (talk | contribs) 15:48, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re:Mis-identified vandalism

Sorry. I apologized to the editor. Thank you for pointing out my mistake. Regards.Oda Mari (talk) 15:46, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] So, do you want to go to FAC now?

I think Formation and evolution of the Solar System is ready for an FAC. Serendi^podous 06:17, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Ashill, please note how I had to alter your sig to remove the "|" in order to cap my comments at FAC: [1] Those bars in sig files interfere with the caps, and cause all subsequent commentary to be dropped; it would be a good idea to remove the bar from your sig file, as this will be a recurring problem at FAC. Thanks for getting on those changes so quickly; I have become frustrated about having to highlight the same issues over and over and over and over again on astronomy FACs ... it's so time consuming. Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for cleaning up my signature in the FAC discussion; it should be fixed for the future now. (I added the contribs to my signature recently.) ASHill (talk | contribs) 01:53, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the first volley, Ash. I really wish I'd been more insistent about the citation issue; SandyGeorgia, as you noticed, is not happy with the current state of astronomy articles. Serendi^podous 08:01, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Sure thing. We did not do a good enough job on the ref formatting (some author lists separated by semicolons, some by commas; some with 'and' before the last author, some without). SandyGeorgia was right to be annoyed about that. However, I do think that the template change for the further reading section made the article slightly (very slightly, enough that it's not worth putting further energy into fighting it) worse off for the reasons I outlined in the discussion. I'm a grammar/style stickler in many ways, but this seems like form over function.

In the future, using "Smith, J.; Doe, J." for references in future articles (as is done by both cite xxx and citation templates when the last= and first= parameters are specified) could help to alleviate these concerns at FAC. That format also has the advantage that you can copy and paste the BibTeX entry for an ADS entry into the article and modify it only slightly to get the right formatting for the templates. It could also allow User:DOI bot to do the journal citations for us if we just provide a doi, if the bugs in the bot get ironed out. ASHill (talk | contribs) 13:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

		A Tall Cool Glass Of OJ
		After the slog that was Formation and evolution of the Solar System, I think we could all use a nice, tall, cool glass of OJ. Thanks for all your great work! I couldn't have got this far without your help. Serendipodous 06:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Red dwarf stars

Can you check my edits about red dwarf stars? Proxima Centauri 2 (talk) 17:14, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Stellar evolution and Sun

Per stellar evolution, Sun will become red giant after 5 billion years. However luminosity of the Sun will increase by 10 percent over the next 1.1 billion years. Will land animals become extinct only after Sun becomes red giant, or within 1.1 billion years due to Sun's increasing luminosity? What will be the effect on land animals if luminosity of Sun increases by 10%? Otolemur crassicaudatus (talk) 14:25, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Formation and evolution of the Solar System

Hi. Just don't want you to think I'm stalking you or anything, changing your changes. I want to change the one change you made to the article, but it's better if you do it, I think. The Sun's light may be dim out there, but it isn't dilute. Also, it's heat that is keeping ice from forming, so to say "light" leaves us to suppose you mean infrared, which is a bit mystifying. The old way, with weak rays, said it better, I think. --Milkbreath (talk) 15:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

No stalking concerns; I'm spending a lot of time undoing others' changes on that article today. :)

The Sun's light is dilute out there: individual rays are spread out as 1/r² and thus the same amount of energy (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) covers a larger surface area. The intensity of the Sun's light (at all wavelengths) is what determines the temperature. However, the term could be confused. I agree that just talking about temperature is an improvement, so I made a change. ASHill (talk | contribs) 16:08, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Good-o. I just mainly didn't like "dilute". Maybe "diffuse" is what you meant? --Milkbreath (talk) 16:17, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

"Dilute" is often used to describe a radiation field; I think of diffuse as referring more to a low density gas, but maybe that's just me. Just as well to avoid both now, as it's obviously not clear. ASHill (talk | contribs) 16:34, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Right. This is why I came to your talk page in the first place. I was unaware of the special use of "dilute", but I had a feeling you knew what you were doing. Still, now you know that the general intelligent readership won't know that, either. --Milkbreath (talk) 17:05, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks again for pointing it out. (The dangers of working on pages kinda sorta in my field—I try hard to avoid jargon, but it's sometimes hard to know what's unclear.) ASHill (talk | contribs) 17:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)