@Danu Re: "The Proposal", worth a read: blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki

@Danu Also relevant, the last paragraph of: blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/…

@Danu and unfortunately, this seems to be fairly clearly against: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/…

@Danu though changing the proposal to mention 4-5 canonical questions could work. Perhaps it becomes just keeping a list of 'canonicalization' targets on meta, as a target for those interested to work on

@alemi: I'm getting the uncomfortable impression that we would eventually end up emulating the "featured" tab in a meta post, just without any rep for anyone to gain. Not that I'm convinced that's necessarily bad.

@Danu but then this most recent post seems to be on the side for: blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/…

@ACuriousMind yeah, I'm getting worried about that too

Then again, when I look at the featured tab, I'm not that thrilled by what I see, so I'm wondering if I should make a habit out of offering a bounty once a month or so on something that I think needs to be more thoroughly (or canonically) explained.

Yeah, also, when I look at the frequent questions: physics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=frequent it appears we could do a better job of tagging things as faq

And honestly, I've been a little surprised at how little draw the bounty offers seem to have

Or maybe they just haven't been that interesting for long enough that people don't pay as much attention

Yeah. But look at what it's at the moment: The two largest bounties are for rewarding existing answers (meaning there's not much more to be done), and the others are either "not enough attention" or are clearly more borne out of personal interest of the offerer than of true "feature-worthiness"

And it's been that way every time I looked

and here is an explicit example from a year ago of emilio doing basically what we are talking about: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/78684/…

It's also the most recent faq

If it is always like that, it is understandable that the Physics.SE as a whole seems rather disinterested in bounties

@alemi And it has been viewed 145 times

That's...sad

And Lubos' answer isn't even accepted

Yeah

It seems that was a rather failed attempt at what "the proposal" would like to do

Things fall very quickly off the front page, only to be found by random googlers down the road

I guess the only mechanism to combat that is to offer bounties, but those too are only for 7 days, at which point its sort of hard to discover it again.

Things can be on the frequent page for a long time, but that requires them having lots and lots of dups

Even though people are very against meta tags, it seems to be useful in a case like this. Where it is ultimately about discovery, and a community controlled flow of discovery, independent of upvotes, dups, or bounties

Which is not really good because we would like people to find it before asking the dupe

Exactly

The search results that come up when you type in a question aren't really as useful as they can be, but thats a software problem we can't do anything about

@alemi I mean, we have apparently got the faq tag already, but until you pointed it out, I was not consciously aware of it

Right. The 'related' questions that show up on the sidebar of a question tend to be a lot more useful. It happens fairly regularly that I will answer a question, and then when looking over my answer glance to the right, only to discover that it really is a dup, but no one has pointed it out yet. That makes me sad

The help center on duplicates does not mention the faq tag. How on earth am I supposed to know about it?

That's probably why there's not much tagged with it - no one knows

And I realize I'm a bit of a wierdo, but in general people don't seem to like to give long thorough answers to questions as much as they might warrant, but that is completely understandable given the current incentive structure, where if it takes you longer to answer than it takes for the question to drop off of the 'newest' list, you're lucky to get a couple upvotes

Whereas the kind of behavior we might really want to have, where people add a new and thorough answer to a question from 3 years ago, really don't get exposure except on 'active' and that churns fast

Yeah, the active tab is too fast, even on a "small" SE like physics

I mainly lurk there, anyway, but don't look for an hour and its another page of mostly (to me) uninteresting question bumps

'hot' is more stable, but very much subject to the will of the masses outside of physics.SE. And its kind of hard to get to, it doesn't show up as an option on the "questions" page, just off the main page

Unfortunately, the masses outside the physics.SE are generally quite bad in discerning what is a good question

For instance, this question seems cool: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/129873/… and is from 3 days ago, its totally the kind of question I love to read and look out for and I had no idea it had been asked. And I've been leaving chat.physics open all day everyday and thought I was scanning all of the 'new's

@alemi Hm, I didn't catch that one either

Though it's a bit too real for my taste ;)

I sort of wish there was a tab that showed a combination of upvotes, activity and viewership, but logarithmically weighted by the acting agent's rep, a sort of 'certified interesting' tab

@alemi That's...not so bad an idea, but against the egalitarian spirit of the SE network, I guess

Not so against, rep has broad and sweeping powers across the site when it comes to controlling activity, it just doesn't seem to have any power in controlling the appearance of the feeds

Now I'm interested whether such a tab has ever been discussed at the mother meta...

Re upvote weighting: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49673/… went terribly

...unfortunately, searching for any feature-requests with "weight" in them just turns up the endless discussions about vote/accept weights

Also upvote weighting: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22151/…

magic words were 'rep weighted'

See, its even hard to find the meta posts.

Yeah, but they always talk about making it visible on the question/answers themselves

What if you never actually displayed that weight, but just used it to generate the tab like "Here's what our high-rep users think is interesting/useful/great"

I think its worthy of having a discussion about. But I'm intimidated by the mother meta

@alemi You're not alone in that :D

"Where do these physicists from some nowhere backward SE get off?"

I mean the discussion on meta seems civil enough, but I wouldn't be able to help thinking they were thinking something like that

I'm also a new user

@alemi I see - you're eight days younger than me ;)

But that should in principle not matter

SO itself seems to have (had) an "interesting" tab. Where's ours?

Apparently, its: stackexchange.com/filters/144627/favorite-tags

Hm. That's a bit disappointing

@alemi: This mother meta question seems to support my remark that your idea would be against the egalitarian spirit, though it is not about the precise idea, either.

You could do smarter things too, like: arxiv.org/abs/1404.3656 wherein each voter gets assigned a trustworthiness based on how trustworthy they are, in light of the results of the "vote"

@alemi But that would imply a change of the voting system itself again, would it not?

Just had read that research and found it interesting.

@alemi The things you like to link as references are filling up my backlog. More papers I feel guilty about for not reading them ;)

I'm not finding anything specific on the mother meta about a sort-by-views/votes/answers-weighted by rep tab, but I guess it would be declined with the same reasoning as the one I linked last

I couldn't find it specifically either. I'll leave it to you to post it to meta if you dare, I don't think I have the heart.

Man...I was having a hard time reading everything b/c apparently my computer's backlight was waaaaay too low

@KyleKanos You mean your monitor is not set to "blazing sun that lights the dark cave I live in"?

@ACuriousMind Yeah, power-saving setting when it becomes unplugged

It got too low, so I plugged it back in

And it didn't change the brightness afterwards :/

One of the kids must have hit a button

@dmckee Well done. Re: the recent question. Very civil.

Not particularly well done, actually. I couldn't find a way to edit the question to render it suitable and had to delete it.

He'll still see the response, no?

I was in the midst of a slight modification

I don't think that is a good outcome, but what else was I to do.

@KyleKanos I can bring it back if you think you can save it.

No, I was doing typos

sight -> site

St.Danu -> St Danu

OK, that's funny.

Of course, the seemingly anti-Catholic phrases he used annoyed me

@dmckee: I'm not one to make tags, but I kinda feel that we should have one for "equation of state"...should I just tag all relevant questions this way, or make a Meta post about it?

I don't like how rudely the meta bot interrupted the ongoing discussion. Has that thing no sense of tact?!

@ChrisWhite Interesting, thanks! Joel might be on to something ;)

@ChrisWhite I actually listened to that podcast in the background earlier in the week, must have invaded my subconscious as I didn't recall it explicitly coming from the podcast.

@KyleKanos So the key is to know what the tag would mean. If you can propose a really good tag wiki excerpt it will be clear that the tag is useful. A meta post is always acceptable as a place to discuss it.

@ChrisWhite correction, I listened to it over a month ago, now I don't feel as bad.

BTW---my last comment doesn't seem to express it, but I'm am probably in favor of an equation-of-state tag. It's just that the concept comes up in many different contexts and the wiki excerpt is going to take some twiddling to get right.

It's pretty much only Thermal & Statistical physics that it appears

@KyleKanos What about the equations of state in cosmology?

@ACuriousMind True.

I wasn't really considering cosmology when I thought of it

That will make it tougher...

Though, the EOS is still the EOS, it's a relation between state variables (e.g., pressure, temperature, volume, energy)

@dmckee Can the community bulletin feature questions on the main as well as on meta? Looking at the relevant mother meta posts doesn't make it clear.

or @DavidZ

@alemi not automatically, but mods can put whatever they want in that box if they care to. The intended use of "events" is to feature posts describing time-sensitive stuff relevant to the community for a fixed period of time, but there are only a few restrictions on that.

Annnnnd...we've awakened the Shog(goth).

I just raised the Kraken

How did he know to come in.....

I am now wondering if StackExchange are actually part of the NSA....

@KyleKanos The NSA is a part of the SE network, obviously ;)

Anyway, this means that "being featured on the community bulletin" is a possible means to promote questions we want to focus attention on over longer time spans than bounty

A possibility to consider

In so much as it didn't become too large a burden for the mods

@Shog9 Thank you.

@KyleKanos And those of nuclear matter or neutron stars (and indeed hypotheticals like quark stars). But I'm sure that thermal physics is the most common application.

@KyleKanos Yes, this is the commonality, the thing that ties them all together.

Ugh, the sun is rising. What am I doing with my life?

(having fun writing answers at dawn, apparently)

@dmckee The question that mentioned me - I didn't get to read it: Should I have?

Other than that - Thanks a lot alemi for your (numerous!) links

I will now have to spend time catching up to this conversation ;)

Okay @alemi re that first blog post, I feel that our proposal would do exactly what the blog post says makes the community wiki 'shine'

because of the important feature of having different answers on different levels

so we really need different contributors

unless someone has unrivaled pedagogical skills ;)

and the second post has this quote: "It has to be more like a Wikipedia of Questions and Answers, with canonical answers that can be edited in one place,"

It also encourages editing in a way that changes the question

which I find surprising (here I mean changing in the sense that the same answer do not apply)

and yeah, that last paragraph sounds like the idea is a good one

@Danu Only if you like being groundlessly insulted

Wait, what?

Are we talking about the same thing? This is the paragraph I'm referencing

Help us build a great library of canonical answers. If you keep seeing the same form of questions, whether it’s mod_rewrite rules on Server Fault, freezing computers on Super User, or how to use regular expressions to parse HTML, write a great, canonical answer, once and for all. Make it community wiki so that as many other people as possible can make it great. Work really hard on writing something that is clear, concise, and understandable by as wide an audience as possible.

I've started writing the Meta post

@Danu: Look at which of your lines my post is referencing. I answered the question you originally directed at dmckee

it'll be quite long - I might save it in google docs and give out the link here so we can work on it together

oh, haha! What was it saying?

Also, are you serious? Or only joking

I'm serious that in that it was basically a rant, insulting you (and others, but mostly you because the poster perceived you had done something you did not do). I'm not sure how much of the content I should reproduce here since it was removed, but suffice to say it was neither nice nor productive

I'm sure the meta post is a good idea, and nobody will get insulted, groundlessly or otherwise, there :)

Now I really want to know

perhaps a private chat?

@Danu Is there such a thing? I think anyone can read/join these

yes, but nobody ever does ;)

Sometimes, even codegolf produces something truly beautiful

Caveat: People currently on psychedelic drugs could get lost in the answers there.

@ACuriousMind So many QFT questions today :)

@Phonon Haha, I like it :D

@ACuriousMind :p

I'm mostly reading them and realizing that there is a whole world of stuff I don't know about (yet)

haha

Unrelated: A question I answered made this pop into my head.

I'm afraid that's an intrinsic feeling of being a physicist :)

@Phonon It's great

we may never be free of it :(

yes of course :)

keeps your curiosity on edge

@Phonon And my never-resting webcomic memory delivers this

hahahahahaha

just saw the first one

so hilarious :DDDD

hahaha 2nd one

liked them both

so abstrusegoose.com is like xckd a bit or? had never heard of it before

@Phonon It's the obscure brother of xkcd. Where xkcd might be a bit interested in applying to a somewhat larger audience, abstruse goose goes full niche. I like it more consistently than xkcd, actually

For example, I've never seen a more succinct statement of how ridiculuously limited our senses are than this

@ACuriousMind ah okay, liking it a lot, browsing through some of them right now

yeah nice contrast

it'd be nice to have the same plot but with a comparison of other animals as well

to see where we lie among them

True :)

I seem to recally seeing that somewhere, too, but I seem to not have bookmarked it

Or at least not such that I could find it right now

yeah

actually from a philosophical point of view, do you think if we had stronger senses (hearing, seeing for now) would have strongly influenced our intelligence?

I mean we rely so much on our power of deduction, it's really hard to tell

Probably - our primary sense is visual, and our best and most rigorous mode of argumentation is writing things down so they can be seen. I think we would be wholly different if we relied more on smell or sound

yeah

probably it would boil down to " a higher amount of distraction" for us,

we manage to distract ourselves enough with our current state of senses (if you know what I mean ;))

Hehe...all too well ;)

:))

I can't resist to post one more of my favourites - everyone who has ever tried to prove something not really obvious knows this.

haha let me see

hahahha

Given my discipline 156 is aboslutely my favorite AbstruseGoose

loved it :D

hahaha poor frogs^^

@dmckee Hehe. Did this ever happen where you worked? ;)

@ACuriousMind love the second bit with the hill "any other bright ideas?"

hahahha guys stop :)

can't stop laughing at this stuff^^

no but seriously, don't stop :D

I fear if I begin posting the ones I don't think of as my absolute favourites, I end up flooding the chat with every abstrusegoose and most smbc I've ever read ;)

:))

haha yeah

they save us the trouble :)

@ACuriousMind, I recently "discovered" a way to handle infinitesimals (and infinities) for some code for a project, wherein you imagine an extension to the real numbers in the form of a formal power series: x = ... + a_1 ep^1 + a_0 ep^0 + a_{-1} ep^{-1} + ..., where here ep is supposed to represent an infinitesimal number.

I can do all of the arithmetic I needed to do for the project, using the power series notion to motivate what addition, subtraction, multiplication or division means

I tried to search around to see if this is a 'known' extension to the reals, but didn't get very far. I've been thinking of asking on math, but I'm afraid there is some obvious reason there is something wrong with it that I haven't realized.

@alemi: There are the hyperreals of non-standard analysis which could be similar to what you did

I've looked at those, and as far as I understand it, this is distinct

Well, did you do anything to define the infinitesimal?

Or did you just adjoin the "ep" as a formally distinct element without other properties?

It seems that in math literature, there is a resistance to identify formal power series as a true 'field', something having to do with division generating an infinite series, but practically that doesn't matter, as I'm only ever interested in the leading 'infinityness', so I just keep track of the leading 3 terms to maintain precision. I guess: this is to hyperreals/surreals what floating point is to the reals, a machine representation that works but looses precision in the corner cases

@ACuriousMind the later. In code, each of these objects is just a struct with 3 floating points and an integer. The integer represents the largest nonzero order that has weight and the 3 floats are the three leading coefficients of the formal power series

so 1 -> { vals:[1,0,0], order: 0 } while epsilon -> { vals:[1,0,0], order:-1 } and infinity -> {vals:[1,0,0], order: 1 }

so, 1 + ep -> { vals:[1,1,0], order:0 }, etc

Then it seems to me what you constructed is the quotient of the field of formal Laurent series $\mathbb{R}((X))$ modulo the ideal generated by $X^2$

And is that a proper field?

If K is a field, the ring of formal Laurent series over it is a field too

and the quotient over an ideal is a field?

certainly not, yes?

Damn

Forget the thing abouzt the ideal, fields have no non-trivial ideals

You can't divide it out like that

I know this (only three coeficient bit) breaks it as a proper math structure, that part I just see as machine enforced loss of precision

But the bigger idea of this as a formal Laurent series, would it be isomorphic to the hyperreals?

But the three coefficients are "special" in a sense. The a_{-1} is the residuum, the a_0 is constant (i.e. the value at input 0) and the a_1 could be the residuum of the inverse, though I must think about that a bit more

oh, if it wasn't clear, at least as I'm using it in my project, ep^{-1} * ep^{-1} -> { vals: [1,0,0] , order: 2 }, I in principle would allow things of higher or lower order than |1| to be formed, though in practice for my use of them for doing weighted statistics, it doesn't arise

I don't understand the hyperreals well enough to pronounce on that with definiteness

It has been tremendously useful though in practice, as I'm doing tons of weighted averages of all sorts, but occasionally want to mark elements as being 'certain', or 'uncertain' and this required casing out all of the possible mixtures of ep + standard * inf , etc. But with these new things defined, I just write out the expected formula and everything just works.

But since they are constructed from the space of real sequences, and since power series are somewhat related to them, I think there could be a connection

@alemi That's marvelous. I think, especially with a bit of numerics to back this up, it would be a great question for the math SEs.

Even if the answer is simple, it is, at least, not obvious.

@alemi Thanks, I misunderstood that indeed

@Danu the biggest downside with making these things Community Wiki would be the loss of rep as an incentive to motivate participation. Additionally people only need 100 rep to edit, (instead of 2000 rep to edit a users answer without confirmation), so, especially since we are targeting these as popular pages to look at, the possibility for vandalism shouldn't be ignored. Low rep users could still participate by suggesting edits to existing answers, but they would have to be reviewed.

Just out of curiosity: Is the "electro-motive force" really such a widespread concept in teaching basic electrodynamics? I've never even heard the term before I began reading stuff on the net about it, and I would have been perfectly fine with calling it "voltage" in all its forms.

yeah actually we had this in the 2nd year, in "electromagnetism" course

basically as you say there's no real difference between the terms, I guess EMF is the most generic term for all types of voltages (Faraday law related or batteries...). For example I've never heard anyone say "the EMF generated from energy dissipation of a resistor", in such cases it's rather "the voltage created as a result of energy dissipation...". I always use "voltage" for potential diffs across any two points in a circuit e.g., but heard people use EMF equivalently.

I just always want to scream: That is no force! when I read it. I'll have to live with that, I guess.

haha :)

@ACuriousMind have you seen the movie "whatever works"?

@Phonon Yes, I think I recall having seen it. I recall nothing from the movie itself however, and I think I was rather...distracted when it was on, so the answer is no for all practical purposes ;)

@ACuriousMind haha okay, well it's kinda funny, worth a watch if you ever get around to it

I'll push it a few slots upward on the evergrowing list of things to watch. :)

:)

I wonder what's on top of that list currently :D

@Phonon I'm a sucker for all things sci-fi and fantasy and currently rewatching Babylon 5.

@ACuriousMind hah cool!

Seems potentially off topic to me

I was not 100% certain, but I agree.

@DavidZ I'm leaning more toward leaving that one... it's tagged correctly, and I think there are ample precedents (though I'd have to check that I guess)