User talk:Jakob.scholbach/Archives/2011/June

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FA-barnstar

The Featured Article Barnstar
For your extremely patient effort in getting Logarithm through FAC. That was a long one.TR 13:30, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
Oh, thank you! I appreciate it.
This did require patience, indeed. Especially if you compare it to the length (and quality?) of other FA reviewsnominations. This one, for example. This also sheds some light on why there are so few science FA's. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 20:29, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
That was certainly painful, but please believe that your patience and dedication are much appreciated. I write FAs on old magazines, and can produce one with about twenty hours of work; FAs like these cost far more than that -- far more than almost any FA, in fact, and they are valued correspondingly. There are few other FAs in this category -- Group, William Shakespeare, and a handful of others. Getting a vital article to FA is a tremendous achievement; thank you. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:03, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for your comment--let's hope you are right :) Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:23, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Main page appearance

Hello! This is a note to let the main editors of this article know that it will be appearing as the main page featured article on June 5, 2011. If the previous blurb needs tweaking, you might change it—following the instructions of the suggested formatting. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page so Wikipedia doesn't look bad. :D Thanks! ۞ Tbhotch™ & (ↄ), Problems with my English? 04:02, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Graph showing a logarithm curve

The logarithm of a number is the exponent by which a fixed number, the base, has to be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of 1000 to base 10 is 3, because 1000 is 10 to the power 3: 1000 = 103 = 10 × 10 × 10. Logarithms were introduced by John Napier in the early 17th century as a means to simplify calculations. They were rapidly adopted by scientists and engineers to perform computations using slide rules and logarithm tables. These devices rely on the fact—important in its own right—that the logarithm of a product is the sum of the logarithms of the factors. Logarithmic scales reduce wide-ranging quantities to smaller scopes. For example, the decibel is a logarithmic unit quantifying sound pressure and voltage ratios. Logarithms describe musical intervals, measure the complexity of algorithms, and appear in formulas counting prime numbers. They also inform some models in psychophysics and can aid in forensic accounting. (more...)

Reversion

Hello. I wouldn't normally bother with this, as it's clearly a minor issue, but could you elaborate on your re-introduction of the phrase "important in its own right" into the lead of logarithm? I appreciate that you have written most of the article and are probably irked by tweaks to your own prose, but it seems illogical to preserve such a redundancy. Why would the product formula be mentioned if it were not "important in its own right"? That aside, my sincerest congratulations on this article and others (group particularly). It's great to see someone working so hard on bringing maths articles to very good quality. When I've studied more, I hope I can participate in similar projects. —Anonymous DissidentTalk 14:05, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your message. I think, we need to emphasize that the log product formula is both important historically (which is why this formula is following slide rules and log tables), but also for modern maths (i.e., "in its own right"; think of the group isomorphism R>0 to R). That's why I reverted your edit. BTW, at the FAC discussion we spent zillions of hours tweaking and discussing about even single words in the lead. There may still be improvements (someone pointed out a prose issue at the talk page, for example), but generally speaking it is probable that someone editing the lead without reading the full article might miss something. That said, keep being bold! Jakob.scholbach (talk) 15:31, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 June 2011

Zeteo is down

Just in case you don't know, zeteo has been down for a few days, giving the following message:

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 403

r.e.b. (talk) 16:21, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for the message, I was already aware of this. Don't know what's wrong, I'll talk to the provider ASAP. Suddenly, when it is not working, one sees how much time it is saving... Jakob.scholbach (talk) 20:41, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
Now it's back. Don't know what the provider did. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 07:50, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Now it's acting weird. Very slow response time on search and save (5 minutes or more). JackSchmidt (talk) 17:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
Works again. Thanks! JackSchmidt (talk) 17:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
Hm, I don't know what's causing these delays. If one of you is interested, I'd be happy to share the access codes, so that you would be able to halt all processes in case it is down. (The problem reported by R.e.b. was not of this type, the provider told me.)
Other questions to think about: some crank keeps adding nonsense references, thus the database is getting unnecessarily big. To prevent this, one probably needs a captcha, but I'm too busy with other stuff, wiki and beyond, to extend the program in this or any other direction. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 18:39, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 June 2011

The Signpost: 20 June 2011

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