The h Bar - 2014-08-14

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2:09 AM

79

Q: A guide to moderating comments

Commenting is one of the unsung heroes of Stack Exchange. The help center suggestions that you should submit a comment if you want to: Request clarification from the author; Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post; Add relevant but minor or transient i...

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This is new, I think

8 hours later…

10:38 AM

@PPR : No h limit 4 the h bar.

10:54 AM

haha

2 hours later…

1:21 PM

I love it when the process of writing an answer actually completely changes my view of things. This happened in a positive sense in my recent answer about the neurtrino's magnetic moment, but in a negative sense while writing my answer to @Kyle's philosophical question about ToE's.

I really thought my example of Feynman's time-symmetric electrodynamics would be strong evidence for the idea that physical theories generically can be expressed in mathematically inequivalent (in the carefully/ridiculous way I chose to understand those two words) ways. However, the more I thought about it, the more I started to doubt whether a ToE could/should really be comparable to any other theory we developed thus far...

@Danu I'm still trying to formulate a coherent response to that question that is anything else than We don't even know what we are talking about.

@ACuriousMind to a large extent, I just feel that as physicists this is really an irrelevant question

since equivalence in physical prediction is the only relevant one, I think. A lot of reading on the development of quantum theory has deeply rooted the idea in me that, above all, one should be wary of indulging oneself in what we may expect Nature to 'tell us'

It is irrelevant in every empirical sense, but since when is that a good argument when discussing theories? It is, in some sense, a meta-physical question in the most literal (and best) sense of the word - a question about the theories of physics as such.

Yes, true. This is really what I am saying

The only point I add to that is

That I think perhaps many of the masters of quantum theory (with Feynman as prime exponent of the view) were right in saying that such questions are inappropriate to physicists, precisely because they are metaphysical.

@Danu You're thinking of "Shut up and calculate!", aren't you? ;)

1:36 PM

@ACuriousMind Well... I wouldn't put it that way - and after reading fat biographies of Bohr, Schrodinger, Feynman and Einstein I think it's fair to say that none of the leading figures really thought that way - but it is important to never let philosophical considerations prevail over physics.

I'm partial to that view, but it, in my view, simply says that theories that predict the same things are equally true, and it is meaningless to ask whether one of them is "more true" than the others. The unobservable foundations of the theories really do not matter. But this does not preclude the question if we can say anything about whether there always must be such different theories.

To me, it really says that observationally equivalent theories are the same theory.

The example of Feynman's time-symmetric EM is relevant here, too

It is sort-of-almost-perfectly physically equivalent to regular EM, but not completely, in a subtle way.

it deals with some problems which are usually ascribed to the breakdown of classical physics

in a way that usual EM cannot

so this is really a sliiiiightly different theory - and it is therefore fair to call it such IMO

@Danu Alright, so perhaps the question is really: Must it always be possible that we can formulate the same theory in different ways whose equivalence is not immediately obvious to our puny minds? Which sounds more non-sensical than what we had before ;)

I seem to faintly recall that the problem why the Feynman/Wheeler absorber theory did not really work for these phenomea was precisely because they ignored the self-interaction of the electron.

This is also not right, although I realize you're not completely serious. THe formulations of QED were not obviously the same

No, it worked perfectly actually, dealing with everything normal EM can do

it does not ignore the self-interaction, it discards it

the electron does not self-interact in that theory

this leads to superficially bad problems

but they are all fixed

this is nicely explained in the book on Feynman by Mehra

basically, Feynamn came up with the theory in order to get rid of 1. self-energy infinities 2. infinitely many degrees of freedom

the way to go is to get rid of the field concept!

@Danu That pinged me :/

1:44 PM

lol

Oh, haha sorry!

I'm sure it's your question too ;)

No worries, it happens all the time

haha, I can imagine

I just wonder if the other Kyle's get it too

@KyleKanos They weren't in chat the last two days

You can only ping people who were in chat in that timeframe here

1:46 PM

@ACuriousMind That's true, but it also happens in comment boxes

Yeah, must be terrible

@KyleKanos There you can only ping people who also commented/edited

And the other Kyle's don't seem that active

The other Kyle is pretty damn active too

@ACuriousMind Not sure how true that is because there have been a few cases where someone meant Kyle but it pinged me too

We are an active set of names

Ugh, so apparently the Wii doesn't play DVDs straight out of the box

...but any computer with an optical drive does

Or do you not have the appropriate cable?

1:49 PM

@Danu: I think I still don't really understand what we are talking about in that question :/

No, apparently it's a software issue

Which is strange because the disc's the Wii uses are DVDs...

@ACuriousMind Sorry, which question?

The TOE one

Oh. You don't think my or yuggib's definitions are workable at all? I think at least the one I formulated represents Kyle's ideas to some extent

They're workable, but mutually exclusive

And I have no idea how to decide which one to go with

1:53 PM

I tried to explain the connection between the two... You think I made a mistake?

I think yuggib's way of thinking about it just takes some TOE, and adds a physically irrelevant statement to it which changes its unphysical content. I would like to discard such inequivalent theories, but don't have an 'algorithm' for how to generate physically inequivalent theories in what I called a non-trivial way

sorry physically equivalent* yet mathematically inequivalent

Yet I think it is possible, and try to illustrate this with the Feynman theory of EM

however, as I said in chat, I'm afraid it is impossible to establish whether we can expect a ToE to be 'just' the eventual outcome of what we've been building up all along, or whether it could be something completely different for which historical examples are just irrelevant

Your approach makes more intuitive sense to me, but it doesn't seem rigorous

Understandable (I also mentioned this in the answer), but this ties in to my view that perhaps such questions of rigor are impossible to answer and therefore inappropriate in this context

...which I of course cannot make completely precise either ;)

2:20 PM

@KyleKanos Has perhaps something to do with these stupid region codes? Or does the Wii just suck?

@ACuriousMind No, Wii just sucks out of box

There's a homebrew thing that allows use of it as DVD player but voids the warranty

Not that I got a warranty with it, it's a used one from my sister in law

So it's just time needed to do it

I got rid of the DVD player we had b/c I thought the Wii could play DVDs

Well, never act on a theory you haven't tested ;)

Yeah yeah yeah

I'm a good theorist, I leave experiments to other people

3

And lament when I have to do something

@KyleKanos Don't we all... (That reminds me that I still have to do the dishes, urgh)

1 hour later…

3:39 PM

@KyleKanos I was also shocked to find my Wii didn't play DVDs, seems like such an obvious feature :/

Glad to see the ToE question is generating some discussion. Agreed that it is a bit hard to isolate what mathematical/physical equivalence mean, I think a full answer will require a mathematician who also knows some physics (disclaimer: haven't read existing answers yet, about to).

3:55 PM

I've got like 8 hours to get 3 more upvotes to hit the 200 rep cap today

4:24 PM

@KyleKanos I never once hit that cap. It's starting to take its toll on my self-confidence ;)

Apparently I've hit it 3 times, if I get another 3 upvotes, I'll have gotten a 4th

No where near the ~150 John Rennie has...

But that happens when you answer something like 2200 questions

@Danu write 3-4 answers in a day to questions with >=2 upvotes (and no existing highly upvoted answers), and as long as they're decently good answers you'll probably hit the cap

Sorry, 2500 answers

the hard part is finding enough decent questions to answer before, for instance, John Rennie gets to them ;)

@Kyle exactly... I never seem to be able to ;)

4:27 PM

That pinged me again

@Kyle can I ping myself?

Kyle, you need to change your name to Kile

@Kyle That pinged me

and not me :P

But the above didn't ping me either

Damnit. Also, how does one change their name? Also this ping issue is ridiculous. Bring it up somewhere?

@Danu

no pinging

or self-pinging at least

4:28 PM

Go to your user page, then hit "edit" and you can change your name

ehh I'm ok with the issue, since I have broadly the same interests as KyleKanos (though I'm not sure if he feels the same)

Also, Ive always wondered what that number below your name is on the left side of the chat

it's actually taken me to some interesting questions and answers :)

(usually from links in chat)

that number = number of chatted messages perhaps?

need to get enough messages in a row to get mine to show...

there we go, though 5113 seems very high for me since I only recently started chatting

@Danu I believe it is rep

roight

4:30 PM

It's total rep across all SE

that's my rep!

Which is why mine is around 14k, despite the only 8k here

minus association bonuses

mine is currently showing lower than my P.SE rep which I assume is just delayed updating, and I have maybe 1-2k in association bonuses, but very little rep on other sites

so this is possibly the worst description of a handful of fields of mathematics that I've ever seen (from an article about this years Fields winners): hyperbolic geometry, which is the geometry you get on saddle-shaped surfaces such as Pringle crisps; complex numbers, which are "numbers" that include a value for the square root of minus one; topology, which is the study of the properties of shapes that are unchanged when stretched or bent; and calculus, which is the study of change.

none of the descriptions are especially wrong, I guess, but they're FAR from right

I don't pay attention to awards doled out to people for doing what they do

I think they're nominally given to people who do what they do proficiently

4:36 PM

Ah, total rep. Got it. Also, where did you get those descriptions?

@Kyle The topology one is how I always begin to explain topology to others. The calculus one rubs me the wrong way, though, and to the others, I just feel like shrugging my shoulders

theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/13/…

I always start topology with "a coffee cup and a doughnut are the same shape"

that one's not so bad I guess

@Kyle I never liked that analogy because of the cup part of the coffee cup

Plus, you can't eat the coffee cup

@KyleKanos Isn't it the point of that statement that the cup part and the edibleness (is that a word?) do not matter to a topologist?

@KyleKanos what's wrong with the cup part? it's concave, but you can continuously deform it to a delicious torus shape

4:43 PM

@ACuriousMind Which is just one of the many reason that mathematicians don't do anything real

@Kyle I never took a topology course, so it seems strange to me that the divot just doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, exactly because it is the topological properties that do not depend on such 'trivialities' ;)

@KyleKanos For many topological properties (the homotopical ones), it is even the case that $\mathbb{R}^n$ is indistinguishable from a single point.

Until you learn it, you wonder what one could possibly ever use such weird notions of equivalence for

I also do not know anything about topology, but I've started reading Reed & Simon's Functional Analysis book and the topology in there is pretty much focused on finding a most general notion for the concept of 'neighborhood', 'convergence' and related notions

@ACuriousMind could you comment how these 'topological spaces'-type topics relate to the usual statements about coffee cups and dougnuts?

@ACuriousMind I don't know what you just said there ;)

@Danu The cup and the doughnut are homotopy-equvalent - there are continuous maps $f : C \to D$ and $g : D \to C$ from one to the other so that their concatenations either way are homotopic to the identity on each. I think it is even the case that the doughnut is a deformation retract of the cup.

"homotopic" is the precise notion of "can be continuously deformed into each other".

5:03 PM

yikes, this might raise a stink when it (likely) gets closed physics.stackexchange.com/questions/130926/…

Why? It's clearly too broad

I'm kinda disappointed it's lasted this long

(without being closed)

Looks like Ali & BMS voted to keep it open

I agree it's clear, but a handful of people always seems to speak up when an upvoted question gets closed

I didn't have it in my close queue before, but too broad is a perfect match here.

5:31 PM

Woohoo, one more vote & I've hit my 4th rep cap

@KyleKanos I'll get the champagne... ;)

There you go. +1 because you brought up Something like 90% of the star is blown off in the supernova event (Type II) that causes the black holes.

Haha, do that when I hit 150 rep cap days

Woohoo!

but answer me this: double or single degenerate?

(for Type I, obviously)

I take the cop-out: both

5:34 PM

correct! (probably)

hard to be wrong with that answer when you have 10^many stars

I'm pretty sure there's like 3^^3 stars (using Graham notation)

what the what

meaning of this notation is not immediately clear on opening wikipedia article :S

Yeah....it's a crazy big number

I can't find anything called Graham notation. Do you mean Knuth notation?

@ACuriousMind Oops, it is Knuth's notation. Graham's number is something else:

Graham's number

Graham's number, named after Ronald Graham, is a large number that is an upper bound on the solution to a certain problem in Ramsey theory. The number gained a degree of popular attention when Martin Gardner described it in the "Mathematical Games" section of Scientific American in November 1977, writing that Graham had recently established, in an unpublished proof, "a bound so vast that it holds the record for the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof." The 1980 Guinness Book of World Records repeated Gardner's claim, adding to the popular interest in this number. According...

5:39 PM

I think it is Knuth notation, often used to represent Graham's number?

now that I have the correct article, meaning is clearer

Yeah, so 3^^3 is a big number

observable universe stars is only something like 10^20 or something, no?

Give or take

Actually, 3^^3 isn't that big a number

3^^3 = 3^(3^3) = 3^27, so decent estimate actually

That's about $10^{12}$

5:42 PM

though that's closer to stars in a cluster

2^^4 is about 1e77

That's just crazy at how big it gets

Wonder if we can do decimal notation..

like 2^^3.3

hmm don't see why not, perhaps with a suitable extension of the concept

but given the close analogy between multiplication -> exponentiation and exponentiation -> knuth, seems reasonable

Surely it makes sense for single up-arrow, but how does one do 2^(2^(...))) 3.3 times?

Apparently an open question over on Math:

2

Q: Arrow notation and decimals.

We know how to add with decimals. We know how to multiply with decimals. We know how to exponentiate with decimals. Do we know how to work with decimals for power towers? for example, can we deal with the following expression: 3↑↑3.5? If so, how would you calculate it and can this be done in ...

decimal-expansion tetration

2

my bet is you first have to define an analog of the logarithm

6:02 PM

Hmm, I'll have to think about this some more

That would be interesting to work on

6:21 PM

@KyleKanos related:

22

Q: Can you raise a number to an irrational exponent?

The way that I was taught it in 8th grade algebra, a number raised to a fractional exponent, i.e. $a^\frac x y$ is equivalent to the denominatorth root of the number raised to the numerator, i.e. $\sqrt[y]{a^x}$. So what happens when you raise a number to an irrational number? Obviously it is not...

exponentiation irrational-numbers fractions

2

Hmm, we'll have to make a down-arrow notation in order to define the decimal up-arrow notation

Kyle notation? :D

Could be dubbed that

6:42 PM

Is it wrong to solicit upvotes on something like this?

28

Q: Why are (galley) proof requests given such a short deadline?

Often the publisher requests to get the proof within 24 hours when it's ready. What are the reasons for making this so short? Do they want the authors to not make too many changes? EDIT: The email I received said: Please ensure you check the entire article carefully, and answer all queries...

publishing publishers proofreading

what's a galley proof?

There is a link in the link

It's the very last version of a paper or a book right before publication

In printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra-wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronically published. They are created for proofreading and copyediting purposes, but may be used for promotional and review purposes also. Galley proofs are so named because in the days of hand-set letterpress printing, the printer would set the page into galleys, the metal trays into which type was laid and tightened into place. These would be used to print a limited number...

after it's been typed in production, but before it's completely set in stone

6:44 PM

And yet, there are still typographical errors that require errata sent out

so a galley proof is what happens after al lthe reviews etc etc have been done?

exactly

cough totally not after a Populist badge

so basically reviewers tell you to change A,B,C and then you get 24 hrs to do it and submit final version?

No, this is after acceptance

so what does one need to do

in the 24 hrs

6:45 PM

Check for typos and formatting changes, figures, and so on

okay - so not everything has been done

just formatting

No, it's all been done - you just need to check that it's right

alright

You submit your final manuscript that includes reviewer comments and this gets accepted.

so you just need to read it through

6:47 PM

Then it goes to production

and they essentially re-make it to adjust it to their system

e.g. Phys Rev * change it to some form of xml or something

and just make sure that it plays well both for print and online

hm, so you need a singular vote to secure your populist?

okay - but they don't retype the entire thing or anything like that right?

(and for it to hold until the end of the day I guess)

I has no Academia account

@Kyle I think, yeah

6:48 PM

I'll make an account for this

though I don't know how often the script runs

:D

there you go Emilio ;)

for your in chat explanation :P

@Danu Be sure to upvote tohecz too sometime

but thanks :)

if only I had any almost-impressive-achievement type of things

I am secretly hoping to be the first to their second "Great Answer" badge.

We all need goals

6:57 PM

I'm also kinda curious about 10k+ moderating powers

@alemi how exactly?

I'm oddly drawn to the 'sportsmanship' one

@Danu They're not that great, particularly after

95

Q: Let's get rid of the 10K flag queue

The 10K tools are pretty cool... You get a birds-eye view of activity on the site, a "dashboard" view of what's happening. Some of the individual tools haven't scaled particularly well with Stack Overflow's growth, but the concept behind them is still sound: we trust you to enough to be a bee wat...

feature-request status-completed review 10k-tools flag-queue

@EmilioPisanty not sure you you mean? How do I plan on getting there? By trying to write stellar answers. How do you earn it? 100 upvotes on an answer.

@Kyle I wish we could see how close we are to some of those types of badges

6:58 PM

@alemi not sure exactly what you want. A great answer badge on Academia?

I guess the 20k is where things really get serious ;)

I made a single upvote & gave DavidZ the first Reversal badge

@KyleKanos well, for sportsmanship you can, but it's just tedious

@Kyle No, not really

I think I'm like 3 downvotes short of a reversal

6:59 PM

@EmilioPisanty, no, it can be earned multiple times. There are 14 on physics right now, I was secretly hoping to be the first user to get 2 of them.

There's a SEDE query that gets you close

@Kyle I suppose I can go through all ~200 of my answers and upvote the others

@alemi oh, OK. You're well on track for that, then.

Eugh, just posted an answer, then asker completely changes question because my answer revealed that they were confused :/

@KyleKanos oh, I thought there were more of those. Interesting. :-/

7:01 PM

I'm pretty sure it was just yours

@Kyle data.stackexchange.com/physics/query/206626/…

@EmilioPisanty Depends on the venue. In chat, I don't see a problem with it.

Gives you posts where upvoting others may get you a sportsmanship

but the actual progress is not accessible.

@DavidZ yeah, I know. To be fair tohecz's answer is awesome, totally upvote that

Though I'd say, avoid actually telling people to upvote. "Go upvote this" is bad, "I think this is pretty good, go take a look" is good.

just - ah - timings :P

7:03 PM

@EmilioPisanty Yeah I know that query, but it doesn't get you out of counting how many you have upvoted, if you want to know your progress.

:-P

@Kyle Yeah, but there's no knowing your progress AFAIA

well, there's always open all your answers -> scroll through page looking for blue arrows

@Kyle More like open all your answers and look for more worthy posts to upvote

@EmilioPisanty Shamelessly admitting that that is exactly what I am doing...

7:06 PM

I did that, and though there are enough answers available to get the badge... no way I'm upvoting some of them o.O

@EmilioPisanty I'm doubtful of your claim that your advisor is away travelling the same day that you are defending your thesis ;)

@Kyle So, in fact, there aren't enough answers available to get the badge?

@EmilioPisanty in my case there are plenty of answers (some 120 or so on questions where I have an upvoted answer I think), but enough are bad enough that I can't upvote 100 in good conscience

Kyle, I think one should not consciously try to earn a badge like that - it's supposed to be a surprise! ;)

@Kyle hah, yeah. Didn't see that. Anyway, it's not meant to be particularly realistic. (Like you're not going to exaggerate if you actually write such a note.)

@EmilioPisanty, unrelated, but while I have you, but I noticed you tried to add anchors to my long temperature answer, unfortunately it seems they haven't gotten around to supporting it yet: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37894/… but I asked in the mother meta chat and its "on their list". I've marked the answer as community wiki though, so feel free to use it and edit it if its helpful.

7:10 PM

@alemi I'm finally trying to do some serious writing on that meta post on 'the proposal'

@alemi No, why? You totally deserve the credit. I was trying to refer to a specific section just because it's a great post - keep the rep!

@alemi BTW, did they mention "six to eight weeks" as a timeline for when they'll get to it?

303

A: The Many Memes of Meta

Meme: 6 to 8 Weeks Originator: Jeff Atwood First Heard: May 13th, 2008 Cultural Height: In about 6 to 8 weeks Definition: The time estimate given "off the top of my head" when the Stack Overflow team has only a vague idea of how long a task will take because they have little-to-no formal sche...

@EmilioPisanty all they said it was on their radar and they have other irons in the fire at present. The developer also mentioned proper footnotes are high on his list of things to add.

@alemi huh. I won't hold my breath on a four-year-old feature request, though

@Danu I'm looking forward to it

@EmilioPisanty Ah, I think it was a bit misguided on my part, all of the various parts aren't directly relevant to the question the person was asking, if its a CW it might be put to good use.

Wow:

physics.stackexchange.com/users/29762/…

9 accepted answers on his 59 questions....is it wrong to point out active questioners to accept answers?

7:21 PM

I regularly review my questions to see if I should accept anything... don't know how common that is though

Oh god please YES! It drives me nuts when someone asks and then just 'leaves' without comments or accepts

@KyleKanos The system used to prompt you to do that, but it was pretty annoying

It's definitely OK to politely suggest it.

@Danu This guy isn't leaving. He's asked 59 questions, 4 of them in this month

leaving the question

Oh, I see

Misunderstood

7:23 PM

anyone have a minute to look at this and decide whether the question should be rolled back a version? there's another answer that came after the edit, but the OP accepted mine... anyway I don't want to decide as I'm not feeling impartial

@KyleKanos Accept rate used to be displayed directly

201

Q: How does accept rate work?

What is accept rate? Why doesn't accept rate always appear? How is the accept rate calculated? What does "accepting an answer" mean? How do I do it? Related: How does accepting an answer work?

support accept-rate

user image

@Kyle link?

@EmilioPisanty Awwww....that would be a neat feature

@KyleKanos No, it was annoying and not very nice

232

Q: Let's stop displaying a user's accept rate

My feature request (or anti-feature-request perhaps) is the following: Let's stop displaying a user's accept rate. For those of you who know "Fawlty Towers", the whole issue of a visible accept rate and our behavior towards it starts to feel like "Don't mention the war!". We generally seem to ...

feature-request status-completed accept-rate

That was actually sarcasm, sorry

I can imagine someone with 1k rep and a 5% accept rate would be harassed quite a bit

It does sound to me like getting a reminder once about a question you didn't accept an answer to could be useful

7:46 PM

is it possible to find how many questions were closed as duplicates of e.g. this question: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/…?

Is it this: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/109776?lq=1

nice

I think this one definitely qualifies as a potential canonical question, especially seeing the amount of duplicates!

Though strictly speaking, not all of those are closed as dups

no, fair enough

but the question was useful

@Danu Easiest way is google

google.co.uk/…

7:49 PM

You've seen the frequent list, yes? physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=frequent

i.e. google the close message,

This question already has an answer here:
How long would it take me to travel to a distant star? 1 answer

Right, alemi, I have but didnt' really think about it (d'oh!). This is why I need to show you what I wrote down for the meta

I tried creating a pastebin acc but it failed

never got my confirmation mail

The frequent sort is based on 'links' in other questions pointing to that question.

Do you have a github account? You could make it a gist: gist.github.com

gist.github.com/DanuThung/a5275a74133332b711aa

can you access this?

@alemi or do I have to do something more

@Danu, I see it

8:04 PM

Am I missing something important?

0

Q: Books for fractals in physics - question undelete

I recently found this question Fractals in physics. Suggest book titles which is currently deleted (screenshot). I'm not sure it's a great question but it seems to matter to some people. When it was closed it was off-topic by the then-current books policy, but it is now a fixable question. ...

discussion specific-question deleted-questions resource-recommentation

I like it, though I think it could be said that it is unclear what the actual proposal is. Is it just an encouragement for people to improve the answers to the 'frequent' questions? Is it to create new questions that should stand in as 'frequent'? If they are to be new questions, how do they get exposure? How do you indicate the level the answer is it at? (i.e. is there some kind of standard formatting for the answers where the expected prereqs is explicit?

@alemi good points. I will write some more

Whooho, 5k. Let's see what awesome new feature I get... ...*approve tag wiki edits?*...Yay, I guess?

Haha, it is a useless feature

8:10 PM

Then again, if its too long and has two many hypothetical different directions it could go, it will be confusing as well. I think it would have the best chance if at its core it was a few short sentences that clearly outline what the proposal is.

@EmilioPisanty ack, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131022/…

8:29 PM

@alemi improved version gist.github.com/DanuThung/a5275a74133332b711aa

Ummmmm... do meta answers with excessive downvotes get auto-deleted? pretty sure there were some downvoted answers to meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5958/…, that either got upvoted a lot or eaten by the system

Do answers with downvotes ever get auto-deleted? I know there's the roomba cleaning up entire questions where nothing is upvoted, but individual answers?

I think if they get enough downvotes they get pushed to the low quality queue automatically?

@Kyle That would be somewhat...counter the purpose of the VLQ queue, I think, but I've no idea whether that happen sor not

3

Q: Are heavily downvoted answers automatically deleted?

I remember in the question What’s your biggest fear as a programmer? there was one answer that got heavily downvoted because the user said something like "Having to learn .NET". Last time I checked it has somewhere around -20. Are answers automatically deleted if they have been heavily downvoted?

discussion deleted-answers

8:33 PM

Also, there is no VLQ queue on meta

Here is the full timeline: meta.physics.stackexchange.com/posts/5958/timeline

As usual, @alemi's research skills save the day ;)

timeline, that's the bit at the end of the url I couldn't remember

tried history, activity

@Danu I like the edit.

@ACuriousMind what do you think about it? gist.github.com/DanuThung/a5275a74133332b711aa

8:51 PM

@Danu I like it.

Shall I post it now, or wait till the morrow?

@Danu Your call

@Danu What would be the benefit of waiting? I'd say post it now, if you're ok with it.

I'll post now :D

0

Q: Do we need and want canonical questions with canonical sets of answers?

This is a proposal that has been discussed to some extent in the h bar chat (especially with @ACuriousMind and @alemi), and a meta post to gauge the response of the rest of the community is long overdue, so here we go: All long-time SE users are aware that there are always a number of questions ...

discussion questions

9:08 PM

The meta bot will repeat you in a few minutes, stupid thing that it is

woops, oh well

2

Q: Do we need and want a set of canonical questions with canonical answers?

This is a proposal that has been discussed to some extent in the h bar chat (especially with @ACuriousMind and @alemi), and a meta post to gauge the response of the rest of the community is long overdue, so here we go: All long-time SE users are aware that there are always a number of questions ...

discussion questions duplicates

Woohoo!

That thing pinged me!

And also, 2 upvotes, woohoo indeed ;)

Let me guess where those came from...

9:24 PM

Is it alright if I post an answer proposing an added proposal, namely that we ask the moderators to feature on question in the community bulletin, so as to try to focus efforts and see if we can pull this off?

You should edit the question! :D

...or post an answer if you really prefer that

I didn't want to detract from the main call to arms, but it may be a specific thing that people could vote on and find unambiguous. But I don't want to confuse the discussion before its gotten started

what do you think?

I'd like someone who hasn't discussed this before to offer their point of view first, perhaps.

that is also true

fair enough

9:28 PM

I'm honestly most scared of the reaction being....

'meh'

That'd indeed somehow be worse than: No, and here's why:

9:47 PM

1

Q: Calculate flow rate of air through a pressurized hole

I was wondering about this: If there is a pressurized container, like a tank of compressed air at some pressure that is greater than the ambient air pressure, and this tank of air has a hole in it, what is the velocity of the escaping air through the hole? Is there a formula for this?

fluid-dynamics pressure aerodynamics air flow

can I get some help?

10:26 PM

What the... can anyone understand what's going on here? physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131002/…

@Danu I believe someone (not you) is confused about what intensive/extensive properties are, and that they, like every statistical mechanics thing, can be traced back to particles

But he is so utterly confused that I don't even know what he's talking about

To add to the problem, David Hammen's answer is irrelevant and has served to both confuse OP further and reassure him that he's right

I dont even... I guess I'll just stop responding...

10:45 PM

"Please avoid extended discussions in comments. Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?" That's pretty cool :)

Had you never seen that before?

It triggers only in discussions between two people - I think

first time I've come across it, so I assumed it was related to the similar new mod power

It happens always when you and another commenter have an uninterrupted exchange longer than you-they-you-they

And it happened also before the new mod powers

I don't have enough comment wars, obviously

@Kyle I think that's not something to be ashamed of ;)

10:51 PM

It happens to me all the time... :P But usually it's in nice discussions, so I don't mind it as much.

11:04 PM

@ACuriousMind By the way, it only happens when you go back & forth three times, not 2 ;)

@Danu Then I am even more terrible at letting these comment fights go than I thought :D

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