The h Bar

Danu

9:17 PM

in Mathematics, 18 mins ago, by Danu

So I got a PhD position in Hamburg :D

7

0celoñe7

@JohnRennie GPU market is crashing, good time to look on Ebay...

vzn

@Danu congratulations!

Danu

Thanks :D

vzn

@Danu =D any idea what youll be working on?

Danu

Probably constructions of quaternionic Kähler manifolds.

vzn

9:23 PM

@Danu so, mathematical physics?

Danu

No, pure mathematics.

0celoñe7

Sounds like you're gonna solve some nonlinear PDE...

Danu

Nope.

Might have to do some Lie algebra stuff though.

0celoñe7

@TheRaidersofLasVegas JD sent me an email...

vzn

@Danu shame about Mirzakhani. need to blog on that at some pt

Emilio Pisanty

9:25 PM

@Qmechanic I just gave it a run from a fresh account and neither mathematical-physics nor mathematics show tag warnings

Also, I'm strongly against the unilateral synonymming of the tag

right now there's 1500+ questions tagged please-delete-this-tag

0celoñe7

@ACuriousMind There's a mod that removes the dice roll in Mwind...is that cheating?

Emilio Pisanty

so, say you're here

92

Q: What are the justifying foundations of statistical mechanics without appealing to the ergodic hypothesis?

This question was listed as one of the questions in the proposal (see here), and I didn't know the answer. I don't know the ethics on blatantly stealing such a question, so if it should be deleted or be changed to CW then I'll let the mods change it. Most foundations of statistical mechanics app...

and you want more mathematical physics

so you click on mathematical physics

and what you get is... not good.

if you want to do this for new questions then I still think it's a bad idea but ok to try

doing this on old questions damages them, though

Qmechanic

9:58 PM

@EmilioPisanty : Oh I forgot about tag warnings. How do you create those?

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic no idea

presumably it's a mod-side thing

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : It is a test.

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic sure, but it's currently sending a huge number of links to a place where it shouldn't

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : This might partly be because (at @David Z's request) I did not transfer old questions to the new + tag, presumably so that we could keep count in the test phase.

Emilio Pisanty

I think it's a terrible idea

as it currently stands we've got 1.5k valuable questions with misleading links

Qmechanic

10:09 PM

@David Z: On a second thought, I see no real reason to keep the questions separated. We can always see how many newcomers there are by checking dates. Or did you have other things in mind? Also all actions are in principle reversible.

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic in the meantime you might find this query useful

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : Indeed. Thanks.

ACuriousMind

Uh...I think if we wanted to do this as a test we should have a meta consensus about doing so first. I agree with Emilio that sending people who click on "mathematical-physics" to "please-delete-this-tag" is very misleading, and this is not how the tag system should be used.

@heather I think a feed into this chatroom is not the right option because it will get lost in the chatter during the busier hours, and no one interested in the tag might look at it in the not-so-busy hours. A feed inot a dedicated "tagwatching" chat might be better, but then we need a minimum of users who commit to actually look in there, too.

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind that... sounds like a review queue

0celoñe7

@ACuriousMind I need an answer ASAP

Emilio Pisanty

10:16 PM

 an answer

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty Yes, but we can't install review queue on our own, while we can install chatrooms with feeds.

0celoñe7

@EmilioPisanty I need an answer from ACM ASAP!

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind sure. it might even help make the case that this is worth coding up.

David Z

@Qmechanic oh, we can't reverse it if you do it with more than one tag

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : ?

ACuriousMind

10:19 PM

@EmilioPisanty I think "overhaul the structure of the review system" is one of these "we'll get around to it in six to eight" things.

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind yeah, well

ACuriousMind

@0celoñe7 Well...it changes the game experience fundamentally, and if all it does is removing the roll it certainly makes it a lot easier (though then I don't know what your weapon skill would do).

0celoñe7

@ACuriousMind So...cheating?

David Z

@Qmechanic By separate, you mean keeping mathematical-physics questions tagged such before today with those that would be given the tag after today? Part of my reasoning for that is to avoid having the tag removed from old questions at more than the normal rate at which this happens, which allows us to reset everything afterwards.

As a temporary fix, we could rename mathematical-physics to something else like mathematical-physics-old (but not create a synonym in this case, of course)

ACuriousMind

@0celoñe7 ::shrug:: I don't share your desire to pass judgement on how people decide to play their singleplayer games.

David Z

10:23 PM

@Qmechanic I mean, questions from this point on which are tagged with please-delete-this-tag, we can't tell if the user meant to apply mathematical-physics or general-physics

So if we want to reset the tags to their old state, we'd have to go through each question individually and change please-delete-this-tag to either MP or GP, and even then, there is a distinct possibility that some questions will be ambiguous (or might actually have both tags)

ACuriousMind

I think we should get meta consensus about what exactly we want to do and what the goal of the test is before we continue with this. Right now I think all that has happened is that some users watching the math-phys tag are probably pretty confused what's going on.

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : The point is that editors from context can see which tags to insert in lieu of please-delete-this-tag..

David Z

@Qmechanic Sure, but still that makes editors go through every post individually instead of being able to reset the tags all at once with mod tools. And as I mentioned, I'm not so sure it will always be clear from context.

Emilio Pisanty

ok, here goes

0

Q: A review queue for misused tags

Qmechanic just raised on chat the need to take some more action on the mathematical-physics tag, and I think it's about right: the tag, despite some loud all-caps in the tag wiki excerpt, gets misused all the time, by people who simply have no idea that mathematical physics is a discipline unto i...

discussion tags

David Z

10:39 PM

9

Q: Should we ask for tag warnings?

I just saw this post on the Mathematica SE meta, referencing this one on Ask Ubuntu, with a new feature SE is trialling in SO. These are "tag warnings", which are meant to alert users about things they should be doing in the course of adding tags to their question. Here is a relevant screenshot: ...

discussion feature-request tags

Posting for visibility

Physics Meta

1

Q: A review queue for misused tags

Qmechanic just raised on chat the need to take some more action on the mathematical-physics tag, and I think it's about right: the tag, despite some loud all-caps in the tag wiki excerpt, gets misused all the time, by people who simply have no idea that mathematical physics is a discipline unto i...

discussion feature-request tags

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ ah, that's where that went

Slereah

ACuriousMind

@Slereah "green slime"?

Slereah

That's what comes out of naked singularities

that and socks

ACuriousMind

10:45 PM

seems legit

David Z

@EmilioPisanty How about a title edit to "What tag warnings should we have?" or something along those lines? That seems more likely to spur action than the current title, and at this point I don't think avoiding tag warnings entirely is an option we have any good reason to consider.

Up to you since it's your post

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ sure

but since @Qmechanic kicked off this round, I think s/he gets the nudge to write up the warning itself for the mathematical-physics tag

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : Sure. @David Z and other mods: Do mods have the privilege to create tag warnings? Where? Or is it only for the SE team?

Emilio Pisanty

@Qmechanic in magical mod-powers land ;-)

ACuriousMind

I can't find anything about it, I think we need a dev to do that

Qmechanic

11:03 PM

@EmilioPisanty , @ACuriousMind & @David Z: OK. Did some rearranging. If you click now in Emilio Pisanty's example you also get the the old math phys posts...

David Z

@Qmechanic As far as I know it requires SE intervention, we can't do it ourselves

@Qmechanic Ah, you you changed all the old mathematical-physics questions to have mathematical-physics+ instead? OK, well, I guess (as you pointed out) we can undo that if we need to, it just may take a bit of work depending on how often new questions get posted with the tag.

I still don't like having both general-physics and mathematical-physics mapped to please-delete-this-tag, but we'll deal...

0celoñe7

11:20 PM

@ACuriousMind I can't run Morrowind at 60fps...

Qmechanic

@DavidZ : If true that is silly. SE has trusted mods with far more sensitive matters, so it seems strange if SE don't allow mods to create/edit tag warnings. Hopefully it is just because they didn't get around to implement it.

@DavidZ : Right.

David Z

That sounds reasonable. It's a pretty rare feature to use AFAIK, I could certainly imagine that they don't think it'd be worth the time implementing a UI for mods.

(Though one could say the same of adding close reasons)

0celoñe7

@ACuriousMind i.imgur.com/0ZmbxpH.jpg

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ yeah, I have a deep dislike of the general-physics tag

David Z

11:41 PM

I'm not fond of it in general (lol) either, but my complaint here is independent of whether the tag needs to exist.