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This is the backlog from my "sabbatical", presented in the spirit of good-natured fun. It's too bad Cons has left and won't see this.
So I want to discuss my past contributions to the multivariable calculus course. There may be some problems with integrating my material with that of others (Specifically JacobB, of course), since my approach to vector components in curvilinear coordinates was somewhat unorthodox. See my talk page, at the bottom.
So I want to discuss my past contributions to the multivariable calculus course. There may be some problems with integrating my material with that of others (Specifically JacobB, of course), since my approach to vector components in curvilinear coordinates was somewhat unorthodox. See my talk page, at the bottom.
==Early September, 2015, in which Cons exhibits his expertise in computer network behavior, gets shot down, and then claims he is right and asks me to apologize==
The exchange is [http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk%3AMain_Page&action=historysubmit&diff=1170098&oldid=1169987 here].
Conservapedia's server experienced a serious storm of sporadic server outages. Cons weighed in with the advice "get a faster browser", and was totally shot down by knowledgeable people—AugustO, Bringreaganback, MelH, and myself. I explained in great detail why Cons's theories were incorrect. Cons thrashed around for a bit, and then cited an article in [https://askleo.com/whats_an_internal_server_error_and_how_do_i_fix_it/ the "askleo" web site]. He attempted to make that web site seem authoritative by citing its Alexa rank of about 25,000. This isn't necessary; any technically literate person can look at the web site and see for himself that Leo knows what he is talking about. Alexa ranks don't make a site more authoritative. And that's a good thing, because Conservapedia's rank is about 105,000. (By the way, ritionalwaki's rank is about 23,000, a little better than askleo.)
Leo says that he is very familiar with the error. In the article, he ''repeatedly'' says that it's a server error, not affected by anything the user might do. Finally, in the "some straws to grasp at" section, he mentions some things that a user might do, including trying a different (not faster; different) browser. But he makes clear that those are very far-fetched scenarios.
So, no, Cons. There is no need for me to apologize.
Now one of the things that I pointed out in the exchange was that Cons was writing "word salad" (or should I say "file attribute salad") in what he wrote. The attribute specification that he gave, "-rwxr-", makes no sense, and does not appear in the page that he cites. I suggest that this "calls into question the veracity of Cons's internet research on other topics as well." The significance of this is that it shows that Cons ''can't even cut-and-paste accurately from another web page.'' He just makes things up. Why does that call his veracity on other topics into question? Because he writes very prolifically on a number of subjects (atheism, homosexuality, bestiality, Richard Dawkins, etc), pretending to back up what he is saying with references to things on the internet. I rarely look at the cited articles; I just take Cons's word for it that the person said that. And I'm not an expert on these topics (especially bestiality). I have to take the author's word for it. But if Cons just makes things up, I can't.
Postscript: In late September, Cons added a note to Talk:Main_Page, thanking Andy for fixing the sporadic outage problem, and pointing out that he no longer gets the errors. The rest of us had noticed that things were working normally weeks earlier. For some reason, Cons must have had second thoughts about his note, because he vaped it. In fact, he committed 8 acts of vaping of this page in late September, some of them probably to other people's edits; I didn't note them in time. One of the vapings was of a routine archiving.
PostPostscript: At 12:59, 26 September, Cons put the note thanking Andy back in again, this time on Andy's talk page.
==September 23, 2015, in which Cons leaves a note on my talk page about "User: Math" and then vapes it==
Oh, Cons! Bad, naughty Cons! You left a note for me, and then vaped it. (You did the same on VargasMilan's talk page, telling him that you had sent him an email.) In fact, you've been doing an enormous amount of vaping lately. One might wonder whether this is because you are starting to be embarrassed about how many tiny edits it takes for you to say something. As I believe I told you elsewhere, the fix for that is to compose what you want to say in an editor, think about it, polish it into the form you want, and ''then'' upload it. I believe you said at about the same time that you were going to vape ("oversight") things more, in order to keep the Recent Changes log from getting so cluttered. Well, I'm sure you've noticed that, with the new wiki software, acts of vaping are even ''more'' visible than they were before. It just makes the problem ''worse''. I'd suggest that you go back to just editing the way you used to. The bean-counters over at ritionalwaki will continue doing their thing, of course.
By the way, you shouldn't ever revert, much less vape, things on talk pages, '''especially'' users' talk pages. Talk pages should simply be archived. And I think that vaping another user's talk page is particularly rude. I wouldn't be surprised if VargasMilan was offended by what you did. (Actually, I would be surprised, since his notions of proper behavior seem to be different from mine.)
Now, getting to the issue at hand, you told me about a user called "User: Math". Complete with the space after the colon that you so charmingly like to put into these things. You apparently thought I would be interested in what such a person had to say, presumably because you know that I am interested in mathematics. A quick check (removing the space, of course) showed that there is no such user at Conservapedia. You gave a web URL. I went there, and, sure enough, there is a user called "Math". So I looked around at his profile and contributions. I found [http://forum.bible-discussion.com/entry.php?1620-Does-God-Exist-Atheism-vs-Theism-vs-Agnosticism this] and [http://forum.bible-discussion.com/member.php?9587-Math&s=932a57f409ec5e0414ca90f01b6e6fc0 this (his profile)] and [http://forum.bible-discussion.com/entry.php?1148-Homosexuality-and-the-Bible this]. When I got to the last one, I thought "Aha! I understand it now! '''This''' is why Cons is interested in this guy. Homosexuality and the Bible."
Unfortunately, I found no connection at all with mathematics in anything that I saw, though I admit I didn't look into every nook and cranny. You apparently thought I'd be interested in what someone with a screen name of "Math" would say. But no, I'm not interested in a fundamentalist crackpot who just happens to have chosen the name "Math" as his screen name on a crackpot backwater blog, and writes not about math but about homosexuality and the Bible.
Then you also indicated that this person might have something to teach me about the [[Generalized linear model]]. So I went and refreshed my memory about this. As I recall, you once tried to win an argument (Evolution, Atheism? Who cares?) with someone by telling him that he needed to know more about the generalized linear model. And yet your edits to that article were little more than links to the statsoft web site, and showed no actual knowledge of the topic. I called you out on this, and challenged you to a debate on the subject. I was actually quite specific in one of my challenges, suggesting that we could give each other some data sets to analyze. My intention was, of course, to find out whether you knew anything about the algorithm that begins with L-M. Fortunately for you, your bunny-hole was close by.
In any case, no, I don't think user "Math" at the bible discussion forum web site has anything to say to me on the subject of the generalized linear model. But my debate offer still stands. One thing you might do, short of a debate but still demonstrating some degree of mathematical erudition, would be to edit the Generalized linear model page and say, in your own words, what binomial distributions and Poisson distributions are.
==Mid-October, 2015, another vape-a-thon by Cons, over Pat Tillman==
Disclaimer: I am not familiar with the case of Pat Tillman, except that it was apparently a tragic friendly-fire battlefield death in Afghanistan. I have absolutely no information on whether he was an atheist, and apparently no one at Conservapedia does either.
But that didn't stop Cons from getting really worked up in a giant kerfuffle with some people (mostly user "Ebionite") over whether he was an atheist. Now Ebionite was obviously a troll, and a foul-mouthed one at that, and deserved to be blocked. But he really got Cons worked up. Cons vaped (oversighted, "burned the evidence") the discussion '''23 times in 51 minutes'''. I didn't save the stuff (I no longer log Cons's goings-on in detail) but the gist of the argument was the idea that Tillman could not have been an atheist because Cons knows that "No atheist would do [XYZ]." All this in spite of statements by ''people that knew Mr. Tillman personally.''
Sorry Cons, but whether someone is an atheist does not depend on, and is in fact totally unrelated to, '''what goes on inside YOUR head'''. And the fact that you say "there are no good reasons to be an atheist" does not mean that there are no atheists in the world. It just means that you have not thought this through. There are atheists in this world. I know a number of them.
==Early December, 2015, On the Curious Matter of Sex With Horses==
==Early December, 2015, On the Curious Matter of Sex With Horses==