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→Pictures, etc.: new section
:I also like your point about trusting experts in science. To some extent, this is necessary -- I'm not sure I have any personal reason to believe in the germ theory of disease, much less general relativity: I'm just taking someone's word for it. Obviously how much we should trust the experts on a particular subject depends on a lot of things. I bet some philosopher of science has thought hard about this -- I'd be interested to read the results! --[[User:MarkGall|MarkGall]] 00:33, 7 October 2009 (EDT) (hope I didn't forget to respond to anything!)
:I also like your point about trusting experts in science. To some extent, this is necessary -- I'm not sure I have any personal reason to believe in the germ theory of disease, much less general relativity: I'm just taking someone's word for it. Obviously how much we should trust the experts on a particular subject depends on a lot of things. I bet some philosopher of science has thought hard about this -- I'd be interested to read the results! --[[User:MarkGall|MarkGall]] 00:33, 7 October 2009 (EDT) (hope I didn't forget to respond to anything!)
:Fantastic job on [[complex number]], by the way.
:Fantastic job on [[complex number]], by the way.
== Pictures, etc. ==
(Now that things have quieted down to the point where I don't have a 75% failure rate when I try to view a page.)
Warning -- long, rambling message!
About gravity:
:... if we're talking about gravity not being an inverse-square law, then to me, we're no longer talking about Newtonian physics anyway.
Yes, someone else had mentioned the point that Newton's law is Newton's law, and Newton said 2.0; case closed. You would have to call it something else. That's why my "straw man" question had been carefully worded "... the correct behavior of gravity is that of Newtonian gravity, but with ...".
The issue of trusting experts (I'm not about to reconstruct a few thousand years of science experiments in my basement; the Hubble telescope won't fit) is central to the whole question, and is what the "quantifying openmindedness" question should be aimed at. But I have no idea how to phrase that question in the right way.
About complex numbers: Thanks for the kind words. I need all the public support I can get.
I see that my picture request has gotten noticed by an admin (Jpatt). I had been about to ask you, here, to do what you could to get some action, since I'm staying strictly off of admins' talk pages. But Jpatt's "If he provides the pic link, no problem" comment shows that either he doesn't appreciate the difficulty, or else I don't appreciate what "pic link" means. I need to either mail the jpeg to someone (and the normal Conservapedia "email this user" feature doesn't take attachments) or I need to be given access to some web site, somewhere on the planet, that I can upload it to. And no, I'm not going to create a facebook account :-(
About the Riemann mapping theorem: Conformal map displays, that is, graphs of horizontal and vertical lines as mapped under analytic functions, are very pretty to look at. Can you outline for me what the square/circle function would be? I may have known it at one time, but I sure can't remember it now. It sort of goes crazy in the "corners", I believe.
As far as software to create it, I recall that William Beason had once named "winplot", something that I had never heard of. But I looked at the WP page for a random diagram (Argand diagrams from their complex number article, naturally!), and they have some nice pictures, with the usual explanation of how they got them. Answer: Matlab! For example, go to the "geometric interpretation of the operations" section of their "complex number" page. (I won't give the URL; I can't stand the captcha.) Click on a picture; look at the properties. You'll see the actual Matlab code. So we could do this sort of thing. But I don't have Matlab; it's hugely expensive. Further looking around shows that there's a free program from the FSF called GNU Octave. This might be worth checking out. That is, if either of us finds ourselves with an enormous excess of spare time :-) If this works out, we should be able to put something on the [[Tips for writing math and science articles]] page.
There's also a little graphing program I wrote for my own use that might be able to be pressed into service.
About the "imaginary number" fiasco. This guy needs to be watched carefully. Not with a "bot", but with human eyeballs. I think he's a fairly obvious parodist trying to get his jollies by singlehandedly creating another Bible translation / Stephen Colbert phenomenon. He has a zero chance of succeeding in any case; he won't get 2 million Google hits with that kind of garbage. I had planned to revert with an edit comment along the lines of "We have a higher standard of logic here; proving that there is no real number satisfying X doesn't show that there is no complex number satisfying X." His "proof" makes no sense anyway, even though it's a proof of something that can be shown in 1 or 2 lines.
Then I saw that you had jumped in, and figured that I ought to jump in with a redirect.
Oh, I see he's at it again, at 13:00 EDT. I'd rather not engage him personally; I'm keeping a low profile, especially on talk pages.