@FreeMind Hmmm?

If you double the cross sectional area of a wire, why does the resistance halve?

If you're trying to point out we're not talking about physics, then that's something that happens in this chat rather often :D

Is it because the voltage stays constant?

I have taken your advice and do away most of the linebreaks when asking questions. As for phrasing, you are not alone in being confused by me, my supervisor and my cosupervisor have mentioned that in my thesis the exact same problem of me seemed to write in a way only myself can understand. However other than the tendency of long sentences, overused of brackets and omitting connectors like "first" "next", I am not sure what is the major thing that makes my posts only understandable to myself

@NoahP Resistance is a material property that exists independent of being part of a circuit, what voltage are you talking about?

If you have a wire

With a given resistivity

And you double the cross sectional area

Resistance will be halved

Maybe being an asperger syndrome person, I don't really have an awareness for a communication mode. It is also harder to find out what kind of communication I lack since people can understood me fine when in real llife there are drawings, body language etc. to support me

As the number of electrons is doubled

To maintain a constant voltage..?

@ACuriousMind Yeah, I was trying to say that. But I think it is pretty useful to talk about something other than physics-related topics since it stimulates the other parts of brain to rise creativity in such a way which can help overall performance of the thinking process to be boosted!

@NoahP Ah, hold it right there - what is your definition of "resistivity"?

I will try to observe how you guys write chat posts and see if that can help me to improve my communication skills

A constant value that is an inherent property of any material?

Where $\rho = \frac{RA}{L}$

Do you guys know any Poetry and Writing community worth being registered in? Like an online forum or chat room? I want to increase overall knowledge in English poetry.

@Secret You have got to read more from reliable resources not general people's chat text.

@Secret Because people will make both logical and grammatical mistakes while talking about things they intend to.

@FreeMind But they can communicate just fine, thus whatever that I lack seemed to has nothing to do with logical and gramatical mistakes

@Secret It's less that you should try to emulate our writing and more that you should try to make an effort to say things in a way others can understand them. It's a skill mainly acquired by trial-and-error, but if you want to try by emulating something, pick someone's style you find particularly easy to understand.

@NoahP Aha, now what has any voltage to do with that?

@ACuriousMind Well I'm just trying to understand why resistance should have when the current doubles, and I assumed that $V=IR$ would apply

For constant length and constant resistivity, that formula alone tells you that doubling the cross section will halve the resistance, since $RA$ must also remain constant.

@Secret No offense. But I most often see grammatical and spelling mistakes in your chat text. However, that's fine since I haven't faced any logical problem chat of yours.

@NoahP You said doubling the cross section, not doubling the current. For doubling the current at constant resistance, you indeed have to look at $V=IR$.

@FreeMind That's common because I am typing really fast to keep up with the chat flow

@ACuriousMind If you double the area, you double the number of electrons, and thus the current

But current and voltage are properties of a circuit, while resistivity and resistance are abstract properties of a material (one intrinsic, the other extrinsic)

@NoahP You only "double the current" if there's current flowing through the wire at all

@ACuriousMind I think I'm being fobbed off by my textbook

But you always halve the resistence when doubling the cross section, no matter whether there's current flowing through the wire or not

"because doubling the cross sectional area would double the number of moving electrons, thereby doubling the current and halving the resistance"

Thats what my textbook says

I think I'm perhaps being a bit too pedantic here...

Let's suppose that reasoning is valid. What was your question about it?

Well why would doubling current halve the resistance?

Are we assuming a constant voltage?

It just seems as if they give a wooly explanation and expect us to believe it

@FreeMind Other than the obvious ramblings, any aspect you find that sounds confusing to you because of the way (to be found out) I wrote? Right now I am trying to identify how my presentation differ from others which can help me to locate the source of my bad communication

@NoahP yes

@ACuriousMind Then that does make sense

That was literally my question :P

Sorry, I was trying to make a pedantic point about properties of a circuit vs. material properties that probably didn't help you

@ACuriousMind Not really :P but thanks anyway

@FreeMind ok nvm ignore what I just said, I have overlooked something

@Secret Dude, you're totally fine. Don't be so strict about such problem. It will be fixed in the process of time. Good to have you in the community xD

@0celo7 Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Releativistic mass is as confusing as the notion of particles

@DavidZ Homework, and I'm fairly sure it's also a duplicate

@JohnRennie Noted. As I mentioned to ACM above, are you saying that not only is it homework-like (which is obvious) but that it does not ask about a specific concept and/or does not show enough effort?

@DavidZ suppose I were to answer, what would a third party get from my answer? Unless they had the very same homework I doubt they'd find it at all interesting. The only general point I could make would be how useful the small angle approximation can be in problems like this.

So we have a user asking us to help them with a problem they have been set that isn't of interest to anyone else. This ticks all the homework boxes.

It could give a general understanding of how harmonic oscillators show up in arbitrary(ish) potentials, and how to manipulate the math to look for them.

I mean, your point is a good one, but that is my counterpoint.

@ACuriousMind Are you going to tell Bernard you're a sleep berserker before he comes to visit?

One thing I seriously detest about SE is the war in labeling a question as a homework. Not mentioning the pretty obvious, "Please solve this problem for me", questions I think all other sound questions are worth answering even if it is duplicate. Probably a new solution is found. By labeling the questions as homework( which might not be true from time to time ) I think we're just killing the creativity and curiosity in community.

@JohnRennie In a (no kidding) PhD level book, too.

@0celo7 Heresy! Burn them! Where did I put my matches?

@JohnRennie A math book

Ah, OK, mathematicians acknowledge no requirements to be relevant to the real world :-)

@JohnRennie you thought I was reading a physics book?

I retain hope that one day you will see the light and return to the ranks of the true believers.

doubtful

You never know what will spark your interest. I didn't even know that colloid science existed when I was an undergrad and I ended up making a career out of it.

I'm not that interested in milk, sorry.

@JohnRennie What are truly some interesting areas in Physics in general?

Math

@0celo7 I am a mathematician myself :)

@FreeMind that's an impossible question to answer as everyone is interested in different things. You could ask what areas have the most researchers or the biggest budgets, and I don't know the answer to that.

From a purely personal viewpoint it has to be quantum gravity. The trouble is that no-one is making any progress in it, and hasn't for years.

@JohnRennie Not everyone is interested in different things. Some areas prove to be much more interesting than the others.

Some areas interest more people than others.

But that was my point. Is the most interesting area the one with the most researchers?

@JohnRennie Correct.

@FreeMind then you will find nothing of interest, I'm afraid

or anything of interest will be horribly frustrating

If so the stats must be available somewhere. But the area with the most researchers probably still has a small fraction of all researchers i.e. most people aren't intersted in the most popular area.

it will be solid state physics

it's the only thing that makes GDP

^ that would be my guess too.

I am personally sick of learning and relearning the same basic principles the teach at undergrad.

Maybe we should ask what is the area that most physicists wish they were working in - as opposed to having to work in something that pays the mortgage.

It is all about solving some simple problems consisting of time-consuming integrals.

@JohnRennie I like your latest statement. What is it that physicists wish to work in?

@JohnRennie I think physicists who work in solid state are satisfied by the fact their work is actually useful.

@BalarkaSen Welcome

Hi.

@0celo7 Rowlocks! We all want to design rockets really.

I used $\epsilon<2\epsilon$ in a proof. The wonders of analysis...

I take it $\epsilon$ can't be negative :-)

@JohnRennie If I were a physicist I would either do solid state (which I am doing as and engineer) or math

Theoretical physics is hopelessly boring

Rockets too

@JohnRennie yes.

I never understood the fascination with rockets

I find theoretical physics interesting but the math behind it is just haunting. "Haunting" in a way that you have to go through lots of dull and boring stuff and get comfortable with them before even thinking about something cool or making a new theory.

@0celo7 don't you like fireworks?

@JohnRennie They're obnoxious.

@NeuroFuzzy Well stories are stories and I have no problem with scifi. I just mean that in my own life I find it liberating to have some idea of what ideas might lead to real progress.

@0celo7 Fireworks are obnoxious? That's a strange choice of adjective.

@0celo7 "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun"

@JohnRennie Then again I find space pretty boring too

@ACuriousMind I don't remember giving that example :)

ICBMs are cool. Especially those Mach-6 ones.

@BalarkaSen I think Werner von Braun was very interested in where the V2s were comng down. So were the inhabitants of London :-)

But space rockets? I don't see the purpose.

@JohnRennie The distance between starts. Holy ... dude! it is alot!

@FreeMind Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

@JohnRennie That gives you motivation to think about traveling in time or somehow bypassing the fact that you have to as an object and living organ pass through the whole distance between to stars to actually reach the destination.

@0celo7 Will you stick to your opinion when you're the one being nuked? :P

@JohnRennie You're trying to quantify space..?

@BalarkaSen If I'm being nuked I will likely not care about the particular delivery method.

@NoahP no, I'm rolling out a stock quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - ask your dad about it :-)

And I will probably be dead.

good edit on both messages

@JohnRennie My dad could be your dad.

@JohnRennie Ahh okay, never seen it!

@JohnRennie Now, your imagination triggers new theories with mathematical equations which might not hold anything meaningful compared to the basic laws of Physics. You wake up and suddenly see you're 80 years old and have done nothing in your life and the theory you imagined will lead to somewhere meaningful has gone totally wrong. You're just another paper in the history. The End.

Just checking you weren't doing something silly there

@BalarkaSen I've hopefully got a few more years before both

@NoahP while you're here. My brother's a science teacher (biology - spit! :-) and I would like to point him towards that study scheme you got involved with. Is there a URL I can give him?

The gold crest awards?

Biology isn't that bad.

A lot of it is.

But biochemistry is very important.

@NoahP Is that the one where you got together in a group to write that article on Authorea?

@JohnRennie Indeed.

@JohnRennie Yes, anyone can do the award, I just did mine through that course

britishscienceassociation.org/crest-gold

Thats the link you want @JohnRennie

Ignore the first one I jsut deleted

@BalarkaSen you mind checking my $\ell^p$ is Banach proof? I'm 99% certain it's right but I want to make sure.

I am no analyst but sure.

Cool, thanks :-) I'll pass the info on in case my brother is interested.

And this is also helpful britishscienceassociation.org/crest-getting-started @JohnRennie

I'm assuming the Minkowski inequality for that norm, of course.

At a glance looks fine. Be sure to check all the epsilons and n's and the bounds are independent of the choices you are making.

what do you mean by that

@JohnRennie I'll let him discover that on his own :P

@DanielSank It's a nice reductio ad absurdum nevertheless ;)

I'll reduct your absurd if you know what I mean ;)

@0celo7 I don't have a simple illustration so I am not going to explain what I mean. You'll find out the hard way.

What hard way?

I honestly have no clue what you're talking about

That's fine.

Hello everyone, quick question regqrding the double slit experiment. What happens if fore some reason there is a pathway difference $\frac{\lambda}{2}$ at one of the two slits themselves. In other words not when travelling to the screen or so but really at the lighstource itself. I predict that all the positive and negative interference patterns will be displaced over some distance. But they will all still be present. Could someone please confirm?

@JohnRennie Re biology vs. physics: Obligatory xkcd

($\lambda$ stands for wavelength)

@privetDruzia What do you mean by there being a "pathway difference at one of the slits themselves"?

Are you talking about using a half-wave plate in one of the slits when doing the experiment with light?

Then yes, the interference pattern will shift.

People, don't put line breaks in your chat messages, it breaks the markup among other things. you can use more than one message to reply to different things.

no

thanks

each one in front of a separate slit. However there is a phase difference of 180 degrees between both sources

@ACuriousMind that's what I mean ^

The light from two different sources is not coherent

You will not see interference patterns.

@ACuriousMind I might need a explain xkcd on that one. I don't see how physicists contribute to a new infectious agent while working in their desert

No, there is a mistake. At least, something not rigorous enough.

@ACuriousMind but it s exaclty the same frequency with 180 degrees phase difference

@0celo7 OK, you wanted to let $\beta$ go off to infinity in $\|x^\alpha - x^\beta\| < \epsilon$. I am unconvinced about this bit. $\|x^\alpha - x^\beta\| \leq \|x^\alpha - x\| + \|x^\beta - x\|$. If $\beta \to \infty$, how do you guarantee $\|x^\beta - x\| \to 0$? Just pointwise convergence is not sufficient for L^p convergence, is it?

@ACuriousMind @DanielSank here's my first attempt at a revised homework article. I've left it deleted for now, though I think you should still be able to see it.

@privetDruzia That's practically impossible. You cannot produce two different light sources and have their light be coherent with each other

I think this bit is wrong.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about.

Fixing that now.

@ACuriousMind it s a theoretical setup, nothing practical

It may be unfixable.

@Secret That's...not what the xkcd is saying at all.

@ACuriousMind I wonder what the chemist is going to say ...

Assuming it would be possible.... what would we see on the screen

@privetDruzia I'm saying that even in theoretical situations, we do not consider the light from two different sources to be coherent w.r.t. each other.

k

>:(

If we assume the light is coherent, then what is the difference between this "theroetical " setup and the much more practical setup of using one source, splitting its beams and putitng a half-wave plate in one beam?

Ok so she is talking about the mahattan project testing nuclear bombs, but radioactive poisoning is not really an infectious disease at all (unless the person sustained high dose of radiation to make themselves radioactive, then in a loose sense, yes

What I need to show is that $||x^\alpha-x^\beta||\to ||x^\alpha-x||$ as a sequence of real numbers

@FreeMind Are you familiar with the notion that if a lot of smart people are debating a problem, and you think the solution is obvious, that perhaps you may be unaware of certain aspects of said problem?

@Secret The point is that the "stamp collecting" quote is something the physicist uses to imply all other sciences are quaint but effectively useless hobbies, like stamp collecting. The biologist then gives an argument to the contrary - defeating Pestilence is more than physicists have ever achieved, nay, they even supported Death - and ironically references that "stamp collecting" would be fun and lighthearted, but not this debate.

@ACuriousMind do you find yourself having to explain jokes to physicists often? :-)

@Secret is not a mathematician

Since you seem to like straightforward talk, let me put that another way: save your condescending holier-than-thou speeches until you've familiarized yourself with why this issue is complex. In particular, you may do well to find out why certain (many!) users of this site, and all Stack Exchange sites, do not wish to support duplicates.

Bad example, my sequences are not in l^1 :P

@ACuriousMind Ha! But why attribute it to me? :P

@DanielSank That's ... pretty close to inappropriate for this chat room

@JohnRennie Is it?

I noted that, but it seems I focus on the small detail of that xkcd and missed out that stamp collecting big picture. Sometimes it happens I forgot I am too focused on a tree in a forest

@JohnRennie Actually, not very often.

@0celo7 Prove that I am not a mathematician

@DanielSank Yes it is

@Secret Prove $\ell^p$ is Banach right now.

@JohnRennie Excellent, thank you!

@JohnRennie Which part? The holier-than-thou or the imperative voice?

@0celo7 I know nothing about banach space except some of its definition

@ACuriousMind Oh, very good then.

@Secret QED

As you say, a fine reduction to absurdity.

@0celo7 Yeah, just take $(0, 0, \cdots, k, 0, 0, \cdots)$ with nonzero term at the $k$-th place. All in $\ell^1$, pointwise converges to $0$, but does not $\ell^1$ converge to anything.

@JohnRennie unfortunately, I cannot edit it now :\

Perhaps only the second sentence should have been written.

So your proof is unfixable without serious repairs.

After quanutm, I really need to spend some time polishing my analysis before jumping into QFT

Why doesn't it $\ell^1$ converge

Are you saying the pointwise limit of that is just the zero sequence?

Yes.

It doesn't $\ell^1$ converge because look at the norm. It grows like crazy.

Oh, I guess the $\ell^1$ norm of that sequence is just $k$?

Well, duh.

that's not crazy growth

Crazy if you wanted it to converge to $0$ :P

@JohnRennie I do not agree with the structure of your meta answer. Of course, others should weigh in.

I would not put the "homework" issue first.

Yes.

OK, my work is done. Now redo your proof.

I've explained my reasoning for this many times so I'll just leave it at that unless you'd like to discuss further.

@Secret "radioactive poisoning due to testing" utterly misses the point!

@DanielSank I put the first criterion first because it's uncontroversial and starts the answer with something we can all agree on.

@JohnRennie Yet it is problematic, as explained in my meta question/answer.

And if you ask DavidZ he'll tell you that was an important consideration when the PSE was first set up.

@JohnRennie Yes, and our rules have changed considerably since then.

How can it possibly be controversial that we don't want to help people cheat?

> So if you post a question that’s obviously been copied and pasted from a homework assignment we’re going to close it immediately.

This sentence is a threat.

@vzn I kinda function like a computer when reading articles. Even if knowing what the full picture or main point is, like a error reporting script, I tend to only voice on the first thing I saw in the article that confuses me. The exception is when there's some kind of instruction that tell me to mention the main point

It says to not do something, or else!

@BalarkaSen I don't think your $k$ sequence is Cauchy.

So if I fully understood the article after reading it, then I might not have questions raised at all

@DanielSank It's not a threat, it's a statement.

@JohnRennie All threats are statements :)

The aim is not to intimidate, so it's not a threat.

I'd much prefer to spend the beginning of the discussion telling the reader what makes a good question, and then explain why flat out asking for the answer to a problem doesn't fit the bill.

@BalarkaSen You're right that my proof needs work. But I think it can be saved.

Then explain that homework is a (common!) sub-case of such questions.

This way, the user who came in wanting to just post their homework question understands why that's not allowed, and the why is a Good Reason.

They can see that the rule is there to make the site work better.

@JohnRennie It's better than the current policy since its wording is unambiguous. I don't like the first criterion because, as I said yesterday, if the question is a nice conceptual question it can be posted from the bathroom during an exam for all I care. The quality of a question is independent of its origin. The second criterion focuses in its explanation too much on an example that is above the level of the typical homework poster, and too much the an example in general.

They way you've written it, we discourage copy/paste homework to preserve our reputation with the scientific community.

I find that... less than compelling in my imaginary role as a n00b.

^ What @ACuriousMind said.

@JohnRennie Your aim is irrelevant. Please think about how the n00b reader perceives the text.

@0celo7 I didn't claim it was.

@ACuriousMind I pulled the example out of the air just to give me something to use to get the feel of the article. My intention was to give the skeleton of an answer rather than the fine detail. Leaving aside the first bit for now, do you think the scond criterion discussion works?

@0celo7 How about "You little...!", said in a threatening voice? :P

@0celo7 However, it is pointwise Cauchy, which is all what you seem to be using.

@NoahP :D

I doubt you can make this work without very serious repairs. Confuzzling two different norms never end up well.

@JohnRennie Yes, although I'm not sold on mentioning "routine". Does a request for a calculation become on-topic if it is not done in at least X% of the Y most used textbooks?

@NoahP I don't see how reversing the convention will avert the robot apocalpse

@Secret Get your priorities straight

@Secret ...that's again not what the xkcd says. The joke is that the electrical engineer cares more about getting the convention right than about averting the robot apocalypse.

@ACuriousMind Which IMO is more important

Ok it seems I am focusing on things very different (plus showing how little I understood about enginieers)

@ACuriousMind I'm being deliberately slightly vague about the wording. This is an article a user will see when they're already annoyed about their question being closed. So I've tried to give it (the second bit) a slightly apologetic tone.

@NoahP I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

I wonder if I wil fare better for chemistry based xkcds?

If that isn't it means there's something seriosuly wrong in how I see the world

@JohnRennie Well, the tone is not the problem - but saying that the calculation being "routine" is the reason for closing the question when it might not be the reason we close it isn't apologetic, it's once again telling them the wrong reason

@ACuriousMind But the reason is that the calculation is routine i.e. boring. Isn't it?

@JohnRennie No.

@JohnRennie Now there you've made a policy decision. And it's one I've said I don't support: How "interesting" a question is should not influence its on- or off-topicness

Ok I think I might not be a chemist (despite I am), because I don't understood its main point. The only thing I can say is that these unstable configuration do exist

@ACuriousMind +1

However, the preliminary data suggests your viewpoint may be one held by the majority of close voters.

Ok in that case I don't know what you both consider makes a question closeworthy as homework.

@DavidZ: could you have a look at my proposal and see what you think

@JohnRennie As I've said over, and over, I think "homework" has nothing to do with it.

Your answer is written in a meta post whose main purpose is to remove the word "homework".

There is a site explaining the XKCD strips? :: John walks slowly away shaking his head::

@Secret The (not very funny, imo) joke is supposed to go like this: "Typographic chemistry" hints at the typography, i.e. the letters themselves being relevant. Reading the text, you should note that it is non-sense, oxygen isn't inert and hydrogen isn't four-valent. However, the shape of the letters H,C,O is such that they have four, two, and no open ends, matching the supposed valence in the text.

So, "typographic chemistry" is a made-up field that predicts the bonding properties of elements by the symbols used to denote them.

@DanielSank not so. It is not an answer to your post. It is an answer to David's post, and that makes no mention of abolishing the word homework.

@JohnRennie explainxkcd.com usually makes these things more complicated than they are :P

Although I guess one might see it as a modern form of literary cricitism :D

and yet once again I completely missed the point, especially with the complication that that lattice of hydrogen reminds of metallic hydrogen and $C_2$ is a real molecule

I have no idea what's going on in my mind

@Secret I think you start freely associating too soon: You don't try to take in first the explicit text and then the subtext, you focus on some element of the text and start associating to it whatever comes to your mind.

@Secret dicarbon has unpaired electrons, and is really a radical rather than a molecule.

@JohnRennie Oh, woops.

@JohnRennie Non-geeks often (usually?) find the strip baffling and the fascination that geeks have with it inexplicable. Though I have to agree with @ACuriousMind that xkcdexplained isn't often that helpful.

@dmckee: while you're no doubt sick to the back teeth with the damned homework argument, what do you think of my suggestion?

@JohnRennie I think "a request for calculation" most closely matches what I most often "close as homework".

@ACuriousMind the phrase request for calculation could usefully be used in my answer as I think it captures something of the spirit. However it's sufficiently vague that I don't think it's useful without a lot of qualification.

@ACuriousMind yes.

@JohnRennie I could get behind that kind of definition, but I'm beginning to fear that the battle is lost. The center-of-momentum can not hold and all that.

I suggested "problem solving" but that was met with friction because it was a bit too broad, I think.

@JohnRennie Why do you keep saying that everyone is sick of it?

> but I'm beginning to fear that the battle is lost

Really?

There are more than a few members who's sole purpose for hanging around the site seems to be encouraging people to swamp us with boring first-year exercises.

@dmckee What? Who?

@JohnRennie I could jet be tired and pessimistic.

@dmckee Can't we agree that some users make a lot of statements which might be well classified as "uninformed" given their lack of experience?

We can.

Very good.

@dmckee I think those comments bothered almost everyone and he doesn't reflect a majority view in any shape or form.

I mean heck, I've been here a while and I still screw up.

@ACuriousMind Correct.

@dmckee we get new people come in with their own views, but they generally find swimming against the tide too hard and shut up or leave. I'm not sure I'd get too hung up about is probably a transient.

There are some users who are a bit too eager to answer homework-like questions with almost full solutions for my taste, but they've always been here and they haven't gotten significantly more as far as I can tell

@JohnRennie If people find that having opinions contrary to the norm here "shut up or leave" then we're failing.

This is not ok.

@ACuriousMind though if willingness to answer homework questions has a gaussian distribution you're some way from the mean ...

@ACuriousMind Also true. I was considering systematically down-voting answers to obviously off-topic questions. What do you think?

:31881352 Oh?

aaaaaand deleted.

I didn't spot the word answers in your statement.

@JohnRennie ah

@DanielSank I already downvote almost every answer to blatantly off-topic questions I stumble across.

No, don't downvote answers on any grounds other than their content.

^ Dat contradition tho

Sometimes I leave a comment like "Please don't answer such off-topic questions, since it encourages them and hinders the automatic deletion routine"

@DanielSank I won't speak for anyone but myself, but I have been on the losing end of some policy discussions ([books] and [resource-recommendation]), and there has never been any feeling that people hold that against me.

Too broad. P.S. obviously layman?

@dmckee Good :)

I stopped mostly doing that though because the backlash is terrible and I really don't want my inbox to be filled with vitriol every time I log on.

Indeed not.

Flag the answer for moderator's attention pointing out it's an answer to an off-topic question. The mods will generally delete the answer pretty quickly. Then all up and down votes on it are cancelled.

@Secret Unclear what you're asking. They need to take relevant info from the link and put it in their post.

As written, I have no idea what that post is asking.

@JohnRennie oO What? We delete answers to off-topic questions?

The only case where I know about that is for complete solutions to homework questions.

@ACuriousMind oh, Ok. I was thinking of homework questions.

But you could try flagging other answers.

@JohnRennie No thanks, don't want to be flag-banned again :P

@JohnRennie Shouldn't we ask the mods first?

@Secret Actually, we do know what they're asking, but the link is just sort of irrelevant.

Or not.

The mods already decline deletion requests for HW answers if they are not complete, I doubt they will delete other off-topic answers.

@DanielSank if they reject your flags stop doing it. Until then carry on.

That post just needs an edit. Will do it now...

And really, they shouldn't

Since the close status may be reversed, it would be a terrible hassle to monitor the state of every question and undeleting answers if it gets reopened

@DanielSank because they are. There is a small minority (including me) who care about the homework issue, but most people aren't fussed.

@DanielSank I felt like "What is the status of this claim?" will imply a very long winded answer, which is why I thought it probably imply the question is too broad

@JohnRennie What? You of all people have been going around saying you're tired of it... right in the middle of vigorous discussion by others!

@Secret See my edit.

@DanielSank Eh? When did I say I was bored with the homework issue? I've just spent an hour writing an answer discussing the definition of homework!

@JohnRennie I know. It's rather confusing.

@DanielSank what I'm saying is that everyone apart from the three of us is bored and probably wishing we would shut up. (I exaggerate a bit)

@JohnRennie Given the usually large vote and view count on meta posts about the homework issue, I don't think so

^ That

I think the "tiredness" is less that people don't care about the issue, and more that we've had these debates with varying participants but nothing ever changed

@JohnRennie Please reconsider putting thoughts into other people's heads on this issue :)

@ACuriousMind Yes, and it's because we haven't deleted the word "homework".

@DanielSank Well, if you look at what John wrote, it might be that not everyone agrees that "homework" is the wrong word.

I don't think homework is the wrong word, so yar boo sucks.

yar boo?

Is that British for something?

We should be mindful of making such implicit policy decisions - John did it with "routine exercise", you're doing it with "get rid of homework"

@ACuriousMind I have argued, I think objectively and irrefutably, that homework has nothing whatsoever to do with what questions should be considered on topic. I realize that is a statement of policy, but I'll defend it.

@DanielSank Neither appears unlikely to me :P

@JohnRennie Indeed.

@ACuriousMind Indeed.

Look, do I need to go post a bunch of obviously-not-homework-but-obviously-in-need-of-closing-under-the-"homework"-pol‌​icy questions in order to convince you that "homework" is the wrong word?

'cuz I can do that.

OK post a link to your favourite example.

@JohnRennie Can't. There are very few.

But that's not a reason to refute my proposal.

I argue that the homework policy needs rewording because it doesn't make sense.

I agree, however, that almost all of the posts which violate the "homework" policy are homework.

Well actually, others have said they see posts wherein the author writes "THIS IS NOT HOMEWORK".

If someone could find one of those we'd have an example for you :)