@TomOldfield "hopefully"...

@Lord_Farin A joke: "I admire those who enlisted for their courage. And I admire those who didn't for their sensibility." ;)

I've nominated myself for moderator. I'll be in this room for the next few hours at least to answer any questions, but occasionally will be AFK, so if I don't respond immediately don't fret.

@AlexBecker Just out of curiosity, did you know Jonathan Gleason before he graduated and went off to Cambridge? (It’s just curiosity, nothing to do with moderation: I knew him moderately well before he went off to Chicago, when he was still in high school and taking courses at least through abstract algebra at the university where I taught.)

@BrianM.Scott A little. We worked together teaching high schoolers on saturdays through a program called YSP. He also answered a question I asked here about Chicago before I came to the university.

@AlexBecker That sounds as if it could have been fun.

@BrianM.Scott Eh, it has its ups and downs. The problem is the program has a few very strong kids and a lot who don't really get much out of it. It's hard to teach them as a group. Also we don't set the lectures, or even know what the lectures are until they start.

@AlexBecker Ow. That does make it tough.

@BrianM.Scott Yeah. There's one kid who spends all day doodling, and when my friend talked with him, he advised my friend to steal a bicycle, sell it for $5, and buy some ice cream. On the other hand there's a girl who's home-schooled by a math prof and we've already managed to teach her singular homology.

@AlexBecker That’s more than I ever wanted to know about algebraic topology. :-)

@BrianM.Scott Oh but it's so nice! I love the fundamental groupoid. It's so nice, and gives me good intuition about the way spaces behave.

@AlexBecker Not the kinds of spaces that interest me, though. A great many of them don’t even have any non-trivial continuous paths.

@DominicMichaelis What will count most heavily against you, I suspect, is the fact that you’ve been around for only two months. On the other hand, you’ve been very active during those two months. For what it’s worth, you won’t be my first choice, but you might well end up in my top three or four.

Hmm, at the very least, we now get the wished-for primary.

@J.M. Wished for by whom?

@AlexBecker see e.g. this.

@J.M. Ah, thanks. I'd forgotten that a primary was one solution to that.

A 4-day primary just to eliminate one weakest candidate (ahem, with apostrophe in the user name) may be an overkill... And the drawback is that the actual election will be only 4 days long instead of 8. But them's the rules.

@75064 Unless we have a sudden influx of eleventh-hour entries...

@J.M. Which happened to an extent last year. I think there is a recurring cycle of people who wait to see if other high-rep users want the job before throwing their names in. That's certainly what I did.

@J.M. Actually, I would not mind that. I'd find it very hard to vote for beginning graduate students as moderators. Sure, some of them may be great moderators, but this is not what they should be doing at this stage of career.

Undergrads are actually preferable from that point of view... and I presume that postdocs know what they are doing.

@AlexBecker Not just last year, in fact; I've seen it often said that they only came because the guys they wanted to run couldn't or wouldn't...

@75064 I'd hate to have two potential sources of insanity myself... all at the same time.

@J.M. I suppose that goes back all the way to Plato.

I wish Mariano could be cloned... four times.

@75064 Would you send them around the world so that one would be up at all hours?

@75064 OTOH it would be off-putting to have four Cheshires staring at you.

I liked Zev and Eric; it's sad that they snapped.

@J.M. I must say, I was planning on running in the next election, but when I read their posts it gave me a good deal of pause.

I hope for the sake of current and future moderators that we don't have to deal with user 242 again. His presence was really draining for them, as far as I can tell.

@AlexBecker "it gave me a good deal of pause." - then it was just as well that they posted their thoughts, then. :)

@AlexBecker I wouldn't be as extreme as Qiaochu in describing him as "toxic", but he certainly was the odd duck.

It's not unlike the guy who wondered why everyone else in the freeway was stupidly driving in the opposite direction.

@J.M. I went looking once and found that he's been the same way on forums and usenet groups almost from their inception. It was pretty impressive.

@AlexBecker Honestly, if it weren't for his usually good pedagogical sense, he'd could be easily disposed of. Instead, we deal with somebody who's both talented and entitled. Not too pleasant.

@J.M. I often thought his answers were too formal for the OP, but I enjoyed reading them. I was amazed by his speed and accuracy.

In any event, I should hope that we all now fully understand that high rep is not too correlated with having good "people-sense".

@J.M. Unfortunately, I'm guessing most of the users (and hence most of the voters) don't pay attention to what's going on on meta, so miss out on any incidents.

@AlexBecker Yes, one serious problem. One doesn't need to read, much less visit meta to vote.

Well, I should be going. Good luck in the elections, @Alex. :)

@J.M. Thanks.

@AlexBecker Just so that you know: suspension ends on December 13.

@75064 Oh my. I figured they'd extend it after undeleting the account.

@AlexBecker Hey

@AlexBecker Turns out Adeel's answer to my question shows we always get out of jail!

@BenjaLim Congrats?

@AlexBecker But apparently mathew emerton thinks i'm not thinking about the geometry much

@AlexBecker Actually that is kinda true I don't know if it is a bad thing

@BenjaLim I'd listen to Emerton. He's a smart guy. Also my algebra prof this quarter.

@AlexBecker he´s from australia :)

hi

Geographic distribution of current candidates: USA 4, Austria 2, Germany 2, Britain 1, Brazil 1, India 1.

interesting fact

That's cool. What about current (and previous) mods?

Geographic distribution of continuing moderators: USA 2, Argentina 1, Switzerland 1.

Prior to the resignation spree it was USA 4, Argentina 1, Canada 1, Switzerland 1.

I guess there is a trend toward internationalization.

Oops, I forgot that Canada is not a U.S. state. Always get mixed up on that.

Well, that depends on who gets elected!

If anyone is interested in seeing a month-by-month breakdown of a candidate's activity (as measured by Q&A posted), use these queries: MSE activity, meta.MSE activity.

UserIDs, in the order listed on nomination page: 8173 (Alex Becker), 62278 (Dominic Michaelis), 8348 (Arthur Fischer), 15416 (Julian Kuelshammer), 45760 (Tom Oldfield), 23353 (anorton), 21674 (Michael Greinecker), 14082 (Jayesh Badwaik), 25805 (Gustavo Bandeira), 34662 (pre-kidney), 12952 (Alexander Gruber).

@75064 thats seems like i would be somewhere at the top wouldn't I ?

@DominicMichaelis Depends on the ordering, and in any case I did not mean to suggest that more is better. Being a prolific poster and being a good moderator are different skills. As you noted elsewhere, your participation shows a transition from posting to reviewing. Here's a nice rep chart, by the way.

@75064 one notice when the semester starts :D

@DominicMichaelis Your activity tab is full of various reviewing task now. BTW I disagree with your close vote on $10^{3.5}$ (unless you found it a duplicate of something.)

@75064 shall i defend my close vote ?

No, unless you would unilaterally close that question as a mod.

Otherwise, it's a normal disagreement on the desirability of a particular question.

well as moderator i hadn't vote to close it. Because I think moderators actions does have a bit to much power. Because if some guys close a question they don't like it (as I unterstand it) but if a moderator close it does have the taste of "we really don't want such questions here"

Thanks for clarifying.