User talk:SamHB

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You are disrupting this project. Consider yourself on probation

What does this mean? SamHB 23:22, 26 August 2008 (EDT)

(see your user page for the reason). --Ed Poor ^Talk 23:44, 8 August 2008 (EDT)

Your edit comment for my user page said "help as asked, or leave" What did you ask? When did you ask it? Where did you ask it? If you had asked me to do something, I would have done it. I'm on your side. SamHB 23:22, 26 August 2008 (EDT)

Open Letter to Ed Poor

Dear Sam - I understands your frustration. This project should give an opportunity to present sound mathematics on high-school level to an interested public. Ideally, the articles start on a fairly basic level, but present some insights for the advanced - or just curious - pupils.
OTOH, when a pupil comes across false information on the maths' sites, he has reason to doubt the hole project: most people understand maths to be about "being right" or "being wrong" - while most other areas here at CP are not so clear-cut.
So, sound contributions especially on maths should be encouraged - contrary to our experiences.
At the moment, I'm waiting for a reaction of Ed Poor, too. --DiEbDirkE 09:22, 27 August 2008 (EDT)

Response to your second Open Letter

SamHB, your letter may be addressed to Ed Poor, but its contents criticize me as well. I have read the entire letter and despite the "unpleasant things" you had to say about me, I am going to leave the personal remarks in your letter and address them instead. A one-month block is showing quite a bit of restraint on my part, because I found the tone of your remarks towards me more than "unpleasant".

As far as I can see, your gripes against me are contained in

• Boolean value - accusation of parody
• Center - poorly written
• Line segment - you take Ed's side in what you call "a serious misunderstanding"
• My planned agenda

I'll handle these in order by length of response:

• Planned agenda. Don't know what the problem with this list is, but I've now clarified where I compiled it from.
• Line segment. I don't believe there is a misunderstanding on my part and you can view my elaborated argument at the talk page. But thanks for at least sticking up for me that it was not sabotage.
• Center. Your criticism should have been lodged on the appropriate talk page, where I would have seen it and replied a month ago. Better yet, you could have edited the page yourself. I have now explained myself at the talk page.

Boolean value. You replaced this article with a redirect, which I agree with since the material was found redundantly in the larger article Boolean algebra, which I had not been aware of. You also salvaged the non-redundant paragraph about use in programming. In that vein, I followed your actions by replacing the redundant Boolean logic with a redirect, saving the nice pictures.

The acclaim I gave to George Boole may be a bit of a grandiose title, but I feel he deserves more credit than he gets for his fundamental role in the subject. His work forged the way for alternative logics with different truth values (i.e. not just 'certainly true' and 'certainly false' but varying degrees of certainty of truth). This forged the way for concepts like modal logic and intuitionistic logic, and also played an important role in natural language semantics. Basically, he had reignited an interest in the foundations of logic, a subject which had been practically frozen in time since the work of Aristotle (see our own logic article), and laid the way for Bertrand Russell, Godel and others.

The other aspects of the article I don't think are disputable. A Boolean value is one of two things: true or false. Other truth values (e.g. "some", "most", or, in another logic system, "probably") are deviations from these two absolutes. George Boole did generalize the true-false Boolean algebra to more general Boolean algebras (see MathWorld for the general definition). In that respect, the Boolean algebra article describes only the most simple example of such an algebra and though fundamental, it's hardly an interesting example for logicians and hardly what Boole was interested in. The natural analogy is of being an important group, but hardly an interesting one to mathematicians.

So, it seems to me that your "unpleasant things" amounted to a complaint about my writing style, a disagreement with me on a disputed definition, and a deflation of a bit of hero worship. Was that really something to get so worked up about that you took such a rude tone with me? -Foxtrot 04:27, 28 August 2008 (EDT)