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12:03 AM
@Mr.Wizard @Kuba From @Mr.Wizard From both of your perspectives, do we indeed need another moderator? I'm honestly not sure if the lack of candidates is an indicator of a good or a bad health of our community. For a normal user like myself, it seems that are current moderator/high-rep users handle the site quite well. We don't have any chat abusers whatsoever, especially compared to other sites.
For the last weeks, it was mostly Kuba who was around all alone and still, at least to me, it seemed that he could handle things quite well. Beside this, we have a lot of other "community jobs" that our high rep-users do for the community for free. I'm thinking of the Paclet server, web-site creator, BTools and the service connections that @b3m2a1 crafted. Szabolcs maintains IGraphM and MaTeX. I'm responsible for the SE-Uploader, the SE-Toolbar and the IntelliJ Plugin.
These are only examples, but I'm not sure how many of these project would be there, openly accessible to everyone if it wasn't for the community here.
 
12:27 AM
I believe we are indeed a good team and it doesn't matter that I don't have a diamond in front of my name. When I need super-powers, you guys are always around and never felt left alone. So for me, it is not that I don't want to step up as a candidate. I just have the impression that it is not needed which in turn says a lot about the work our current moderators do :)
Finally, I cannot tell often enough how impressed I am when I look how much editing and review work @m_goldberg is doing that mostly goes unnoticed. I value this so much, that I even consider spending 2h debugging Javascript.
2
 
 
2 hours later…
2:40 AM
"For the last weeks, it was mostly Kuba who was around all alone and still, at least to me, it seemed that he could handle things quite well." That may well be the case but it's not a fair workload, IMHO. I'm much less involved these days, J.M. is ill, and R.M hasn't been a regular contributor in a long time, though he does help with CM duties from time to time. I think there should be at least two fully-active CM's at any given time, to discuss issues etc.
@halirutan
 
@Mr.Wizard OK. These are fair points. I will consider stepping up when I had a night to sleep over it.
 
@eyorble I respect that position. For what it's worth my comment wasn't intended to bully anyone into stepping forward, or an implicit request for an explanation. Simply it is my observation that compared to when the site was formed (separate from Stack Overflow) the wind seems to have gone out of our collective sails.
 
 
4 hours later…
6:33 AM
@halirutan yep, surely I'm not overwhelmed by workload, but another CM would help me to chill out when I go offline :)
And yes, community is doing a great job.
 
 
2 hours later…
9:02 AM
Best practices in gui construction in Mathematica are not shaped by the design but by a jungle of bugs:
0
Q: What is the point of PaneSelector?

KubaIntro PaneSelector looks like a pretty idiomatic way to toggle displayed content e.g.: PaneSelector[ {True -> progressBar, False -> button} , Dynamic @ processing ] Analogous If version: Dynamic[ If[processing, progressBar, button] ] The difference is that PaneSelector content will be co...

 
 
4 hours later…
12:40 PM
@HenrikSchumacher Hm, what do you mean with the comment that you can download the package only once? The comment is under your answer: mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/173933/42046
 
It's a trial version, right? Well I probably can download it several times but what about installing and running it?
Doesn't matter though. In fact, I was looking for a cheap excuse because I am not interested at all in AceFem. But thanks for the hint!
 
@HenrikSchumacher Haha, no worries :) Anyway, I think "trial" version is trial only in the name and there are no limits to installation.
 
1:34 PM
@halirutan. I have installed version 1.4.1 into my Safari NinjaKit extension and tested it. All seems good now.
 
@m_goldberg You are our expert editor. So it was my pleasure to make your life a bit easier. You're welcome.
 
1:46 PM
@halirutan. I have become very much dependent on your buttons, so thanks for making the new version available so quickly.
@Kuba. I am thinking about becoming a candidate for moderator. However, I don't think I can put more than three hours a day into the job, and some days not even that much. Is that enough time to be a useful assistant to you?
 
2:03 PM
@halirutan Great move!
 
 
1 hour later…
3:06 PM
A teaser for planar graph visualization from the next IGraph/M :-)
7
Q: Algorithms for "pleasing" drawings of planar graphs, possibly on sphere

SzabolcsWhat algorithms exist to draw planar graphs without edge crossings in a way that they are easy to interpret by humans? There are multiple algorithms that can handle any planar graph, such as Schnyder's algorithm or Chrobak-Payne. These typically produce a result that is not very useful. Here's...

With a plain GraphLayout -> TutteEmbedding, we get this for the graph in that post:
user image
2
With the ability to choose the outer face and consider edge weights, we can get these instead:
user image
2
user image
2
That doesn't mean that the problem from my Math.SE question is solved, through.
 
3:30 PM
 
@HenrikSchumacher I had not considered MrWiz's point and it is a very valid one.
 
Note that we can't just blow this up by converting to polar coordinates and applying some non-linear transformation to the radius. That often results in intersecting edges.
 
@Szabolcs I had given your question some thought but could not really come up with something easy. The vertices needed to be classified into groups that share certain properties. If one had this, one could probably come up with an algorithm but the problem is so damn hard. Especially, when you don't work with graphs everyday.
 
I made some progress since then, and the Tutte layout seems very promising with some additional modifications.
First, we can choose the outer face. That can make it much nicer. When the graph has symmetries, it can be done based on that.
Mathematica's implementation doesn't allow choosing the outer face, but I now implemented that.
Second, the weighting helps a lot. I have not seen this done anywhere else though and I don't know why. It would be nice to prove that the layout is convex and crossing free even with the weighting ...
Finally, this is guaranteed to work only for 3-vertex connected graphs. Those are graphs which cannot be disconnected by removing any two vertices.
Since then I learned a bit more about such planar graph, e.g. that the embedding on a sphere is unique if it is 3-vertex connected, and that the faces are proper polygons when it is 2-vertex-connected.
 
@Szabolcs That was one problem I had when I thought about it. The moment I tried to think of a non-trivial example, my whole idea fell apart.
 
3:40 PM
To handle graphs that are not such, we can try to add some more edges to make ti first biconnected, then triconnected. That is not a trivial problem, but it turns out to be necessary for other planar drawing algorithms too and there are papers for it.
I'm experimenting with that now.
 
 
1 hour later…
4:52 PM
@m_goldberg I am putting far less than that into the site in general at this time, so it certainly would be a significant improvement. Further I don't think that I have ever spent as much or more than that on a regular basis on moderator duties, and I used to pull my weight in that department quite well I think. It's just not that time-demanding. Occasionally I'd spend most of a day retagging questions and deleting old closed questions, etc., but that was my choice and not a necessity.
 
5:34 PM
Hello everyone
i got a very strange behaviour at a ParametricPlot3D
Could someone check if
Manipulate[
ParametricPlot3D[{2 x, 2 y,
Norm[{x, y}]^2 - 1}/(1 + Norm[{x, y}]^2), {x, -0.5, 0.5}, {y,
Sqrt[3]/2, t}, PlotRange -> Full], {t, 5, 100}] behaves the same way on your machines
 
Strange is in the eye of the beholder. I suspect you might want to add in PlotPoints -> 100, MaxRecursion -> 5 or something similar.
@DominicMichaelis Suggestion is above.
 
5:52 PM
@JimB Excuse me, I don't see any Suggestion. I wanted to plot the Fundamental domain of a modular form in the stereographic projection
 
@DominicMichaelis I suspect you might want to add in PlotPoints -> 100, MaxRecursion -> 5 or something similar.
 
6:08 PM
@JimB Thanks a lot it is working now :) But honestly I am kind of disappointed of mathematica for screwing it up without your help
 
6:21 PM
@DominicMichaelis Don't think that Mathematica screwed it up. The online manual talks about the need to add additional sampling points and recursion for some functions. Also, you might want to add in Mesh -> {15, 150} or something similar to show the contour lines as $t$ changes.
 
 
2 hours later…
8:12 PM
@m_goldberg, I second what @Mr.Wizard said, it is not as much time consuming, and based on the impact you have on the site I think it is more than enough :)
 
 
2 hours later…
9:44 PM
@Kuba, @Mr.Wizard. I would probably need to put in more time than you two do because at my advanced age I have slowed down quite a lot. Everything is slower: reading, typing, and most troubling, thinking. I might be down close to 50% of the speed I had in those activities 30 or 40 years ago.
 
 
1 hour later…
10:49 PM
@m_goldberg i think you are great, i have always found your answers very helpful and clear. you also edited my very first post here when i did not know the basic rules .. i am grateful you are here.
 
11:27 PM
Is someone here with a running version 9 who could test if
CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], WindowStatusArea] = "Testlabel"
already works in this version?
 

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