User:Linas

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[edit] Wikipedia Needs New Leadership

Its time for a coup. Jimbo Wales has got to go. Wikipedia has been in trouble for a while. It is time to clean the ranks and get new leadership. Question Authority, and see how they react!

Wikipedia has many problems, everything from retaining expert editors and ensuring scientific accuracy in its articles, dealing with cranks and crackpots, to malicious edits (see the edit history of Diego Rivera, for example), to wildly POV articles (see Henry Ford, for example). My most personal beef is that I've now had at least five different admins threaten me with banning, for entirely spurious, personal, mean and vindictive reasons. Bah. Shame on them! Read the Specifics section below. Do I look like a person who needs to be threatened with banning on a regular basis?

And finally, far and away most shamefully, the latest juicy tidbits:

The fact that these scandals have been going on for years, and that Jimmy Wales manages to take the wrong side of the issue on a consistent basis, indicates that its time to get new leadership and to clean house.

[edit] Specifics

There was a recent debate at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Totient function/Proofs where non-mathematicians were pitted against mathematicians regarding the deletion of a mathematical article. Why are non-experts allowed to interfere with the operations of a local, functioning community of experts? Maybe proofs are a bad idea for WP, but this question should be decided by the community of subject experts, rather than some random outsiders. The discussion should occur in a general, open discussion forum, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs, rather than in a wham bam, up or down, article deletion in seven days, the moral equivalent of random act of senseless drive-by article shooting.

These cock-ups recur regularly. I should have been keeping a list for years. Never too late to start:

  • Talk:Entropy#Requested move, some non-controversial, common-sense editorial janitoring spun out of control: there's puke on the floor, and there are editors arguing that since classrooms have had puke on the floor for centuries, it shouldn't be cleaned up. Sheesh!

[edit] About Me

Linas is a common given name among people of Lithuanian descent. Lithuanian children are traditionally given one pagan name and one Christian name; thus Linas is the given pagan name, in honor of Linai, the name of the flax or linseed plant, from which linen cloth is woven. Traditional Lithuanian folk clothing is made primarily of woven linen cloth. The Indo-European root lin- also appears in the words linseed oil and linoleum.

I am currently employed by Novamente as an artificial general intelligence hacker, currently focusing on linguistic interfaces. Until recently, I worked at IBM as a hacker working on the Linux kernel for PowerPC-based mainframes. The Linux on the PowerPC wiki is a good place to find out more about IBM Linux mainframes and systems. I've been active in the Linux community; my personal website at http://www.linas.org/ has a set of once-extensive but now stale Enterprise Linux pages. I was a founder of the Gnome Foundation; and I was the lead developer for GnuCash for over 7 years. I've founded three dot-com startups, with real VC money: "Teleport Travel" (later "Intransco"), "Gnumatic", and "Tristel" (later "TQI"). All of which failed to enrich me financially. I was a founding member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board; and spent 8 years learning about and designing 3D graphics hardware and software. I received a PhD in theoretical physics from SUNY at Stony Brook; the thesis topic was suggested by A. D. Jackson and Fred Goldhaber, on the bag model, which combines quark and meson models of the nucleon. I frittered away the marvelous opportunity offered by a year-long postdoc at SPhT-CEA/Saclay at CEA/CEN. Currently, I am utterly infatuated with mathematics, and have made large contributions to over 300 math articles in Wikipedia. BTW, y'all, global warming is for real. Do something about it.

This user attends or attended the University of Chicago.


[edit] Quote of the month

There's no point in arguing with the empty-product crowd, Jersey Devil. You can point out to them all day long that the sentence "1 can be written as the product of 0 prime numbers" means the same thing as "1 cannot be written as the product of any prime numbers". And they won't listen, or they'll tell you you're wrong. When you ask them to write down 0 numbers and they don't do it, and then claim that they've already done it, and there's "nothing" to it, you can begin to grasp the difference between that kind of formalistic logic and the kind of thinking you and I do. DavidCBryant 19:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
But they don't "mean" the same thing. They are saying different things about the relationship between 1 and prime numbers. Possibly those things are logically equivalent, or not, but they are not the same. Zaslav (talk) 22:07, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What am I doing?

You should have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
You should have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

I am using Wikipedia to learn mathematics, both by reading and by writing. In the process, I've generated lots of wacky ideas, epiphanies, and insights into things that should be obvious but aren't. I've made thousands of edits, although almost all of my efforts are limited to math and physics.

Below are some brief essays. They may be wrong, they may be built on false assumptions, and they may make incorrect deductions; they may be "not even wrong" in the words of Pauli. I have not yet given the effort to make these rigorous, although I intend to. I only claim that they are inspired daydreams through topics in math and physics, that may offer insight and understanding, at least to me.

[edit] Quantum lambda calculus

The study of integers leads naturally to the idea of modular forms. Modular forms themselves can be understood as a certain type of analytic function, or structure, on infinite binary trees. This follows because the structure of the modular group can be understood to be a binary tree: this is explicitly visible in the self-similarity of various modular functions, such as the Euler phi function. The study of modular forms can be generalized a bit, for example, to automorphic forms. In a certain sense, the binary tree is what is left over after ignoring the group structure of the modular group.

Now the infinite binary tree is a special case of a free object. Another interesting example of a free object is a term algebra. Can the concept of a modular form (as an analytic structure on a tree) be extended to an analytic structure on a term algebra? That is, can the concept of modularity be extended to structures that are not groups, structures that lack inverses, or at least, might not be closed under inverses? Or is the concept of modularity strictly limited to groups? Now, combinatorial analysis takes some steps in this direction when it looks at analytic structures anchored on combinatorial identities, but it does not go all the way.

To go "all the way" would require finding an analytic structure for embedding all of lambda calculus. One can do this in a naive (and unsatisfactory) kind of way by mapping the syntax tree of a given lambda expression onto a binary tree. However, the syntactic structure seems to get glossed over, so one wants to do a bit better, and explicitly exhibit the self-similarity of recursive functions (e.g. as studied in denotational semantics).

Achieving this would be an interesting mind-bender, since lambda calculus is naturally set in Caretesian-closed categories, and of course, maps to all computation via Turing machines. The goal is to provide a bridge across the space of "discrete things" -- the finite mathematics of computation, to the space of things that live in the cardinality of the continuum, analytic functions. By analogy, "integers are to modular forms as lambda calculus is to what?"

There is a sort-of bridge there, already, but it's dual, in a sense: this is the idea of topological finite automata as generalizations of quantum finite automata, which are in turn generalizations of non-deterministic finite automata. An interesting program would be to extend this generalization to full-fledged Turning machines, and then, via Church's theorem bridge across to lambda calculus. That is, define what a "quantum lambda calculus" would be.

linas 8 April 2008

[edit] More wacky thoughts

Actually, psychologists call them A-Ha! moments, ephiphanies, sudden intuition, or grokking. A collection of older epiphanies into physics and math were moved to a sub-page.

[edit] Science controversy

Wikipedia has become a magnet for anyone with an intellectual life. This includes not only balanced personalities wih legitimate interests, but also promoters, cranks, kooks, snake-oil salesmen, and those with an inflated ego and sense of self-importance. Some of these attentions end up distorting the content of Wikipedia, and tend to embroil Wikipedians in controversy and argument. This is a real problem, and it saps the energies and emotions of the particpants. Good editors can be and sometimes are driven away by bad editors. There is concern that the cranks, kooks and self-promoters will someday outnumber the good editors.

Chris Hillman examines this in far greater depth, in the essay User:Hillman/Digging, focusing in particular on the issue of uncovering the identity of those who make bad-faith edits. Unfortunately, Chris has left. See Wikipedia:Expert Retention for a discussion of why some experts leave WP.

See my page User:Linas/Science controversy for a partial list of controversies I've been embroiled in. See also User:Linas/Arbatsky's principle unmasked for a contentious but interesting topic in mathematics.

[edit] What's wrong with WP?

Current WP policies empower amateurs to the detriment of the content. I gave up long ago trying to create, edit or maintain articles on topics that are widely taught in high-school or college. I was quickly and repeatedly burned by ignoramous but self-assured students who had no idea of what they were talking about. I limit myself to the obscure, arcane topics, where life is mostly placid and peaceful. Some essays on discontent:

[edit] ToDo List

[edit] Handy-Dandy Links

Wikipedia:Cite sources -- m:Cite/Cite.php -- Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity -- Wikipedia:Stable versions -- Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible -- Category:Editorial validation -- User:Linas/Original research, peer review and reputation on Wikipedia --

[edit] Purdy pictures

User:Linas/Pictures contains a gallery of pictures I've created for WP. There are more at my Art gallery. See Wikipedia:picture tutorial for help; and also Category:Math images and Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Graphics.

My favorites include:

invariant g_3 real part
invariant g_3 real part
Modular discriminant
Modular discriminant
Klein's J-invariant, phase
Klein's J-invariant, phase
Klein's J-invariant, modulus
Klein's J-invariant, modulus


[edit] Category sweeps

I've recategorized over 2000 articles on WP, and created several dozen categories. Major category work and cleanup is listed at User:Linas/Categories.

[edit] Templates

Templates I've created:

[edit] General Science edits

I've made major contributions to the following non-math/non-physics science articles:

History of physics

The Oxford Electric Bell -- Contact tension -- The Beverly Clock -- Nobel Prize in Physics -- Principle of least action -- Michelson stellar interferometer -- Schwarzschild radius

Computer science

Literal pool -- Hypervisor -- Ground bounce -- AIX operating system -- IBM RT -- Chipkill -- Forward error correction

General science

Meteor -- STEP (satellite) -- Old-house borer -- Photovoltaic array -- Solar panel -- Piracetam -- Lipofuscin -- Lexical unit

[edit] Non-science edits

I've made major contributions to the following non-science articles: Panevezys County -- Vytenis -- Zvelgaitis -- Squidward Tentacles -- The Knoxville Girl -- Diego Rivera -- Spice wars

[edit] ROTFL