User talk:Tom Morris

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Aleksander Stos 07:43, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

Hastiness

You might want to let more than an hour or so go by before you consider a question closed; I was researching a considered comment at Talk:The Republic and while I was doing so, found out that the page had been moved out from underneath me. J. Noel Chiappa 19:02, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

I'm very sorry about that. I hope that the move to The Republic (dialogue of Plato) is satisfactory. --Tom Morris 19:08, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

I'm OK with it, but I don't know about others. J. Noel Chiappa 20:13, 31 March 2008 (CDT)

Scientology & Criticism

Tom, see this section about the CoS. We absolutely must do better on this; while I don't disagree with the presence of the content, I have to agree with Stephen that it is extremely amateurish and too 'pedian for us. --Robert W King 09:28, 28 April 2008 (CDT)

see my response on Talk:Church of Scientology. --Tom Morris 11:15, 28 April 2008 (CDT)

Self-harming

Enough of that! Your content is very impressive. Good luck with the research day. Ro Thorpe 10:17, 29 April 2008 (CDT)

Supreme Court

I've been away from CZ for a couple of months and just noticed you changed the name of the U.S. Supreme Court in the article I wrote about Miranda, and I wanted to bring a couple of points to your attention in case you're not a lawyer or legal writer and so not familiar with common conventions in the U.S. (1) The formal name of the federal high court is not "Supreme Court of the United States" but "Supreme Court of the United States of America," but its Blue Book designation is "U.S.," so it's generally referred to in even formal legal writing as "U.S. Supreme Court." (2) To be consistent, if you're going to call it "Supreme Court of the United States," you should call the state court mentioned in the article the "Supreme Court of [the State of] Arizona." The reason that isn't the usual practice is that when you're reading anything that frequently mentions courts' names, having the jurisdiction first in each court's name makes for faster reading and better comprehension. -- k kay shearin 23:10, 18 May 2008 (CDT)

I made no judgment as to the validity of the name. I followed common usage on other articles and the website of the Supreme Court in changing them so they all point to the same place. Feel free to use the talk page on Supreme Court of the United States to discuss the naming with those in the Law workgroup. --Tom Morris 03:08, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

This problem should also be mentioned on the discussion page of CZ:Naming_Conventions, as some people there are convinced that there is one common name for anything and no problems of deciding names for article titles. Given that that is the policy page for CZ, it ranks higher than the Law workgroup. My initial comment is that it is against CZ policy to refer to the United States of America as "United States", although if it is a formal name then that would not be true. From what I read above, U.S. Supreme Court would seem a better designation. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 06:07, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

Martin Heidegger

I recently started the Martin Heidegger page, mainly so as to have some live content for the related articles pages elsewhere (Amish/Related_Articles since some have asserted that the Amish may have achieved the "free relationship" to technology that Heidegger called for). Be that as it may, I am a bit concerned that I have put too much emphasis on Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology in the intro section because of my own interest in that question.

Just thought you should know since Heidegger is on your "to do" list. Anyway, I have no immediate plans to develop the Heidegger article beyond its presnt introduction stage, so feel free to have at it.

James F. Perry 22:58, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

• Thanks. I saw that - it's on my watchlist and will hopefully expand it soon. --Tom Morris 04:55, 26 May 2008 (CDT)

Titles of Bible-book articles

Hi, Tom -- J. Noel just sent me a message suggesting that articles on Bible books could be named, e.g., "Genesis (Bible book)" because they may need disambiguation (e.g., from "Genesis (musical group)", "Exodus (novel)", etc.). But since it's you and not I creating these articles I thought I'd pass the suggestion along to you in case you want to consider it. Bruce M.Tindall 11:28, 6 June 2008 (CDT)

Thank you for authoring in computers

Tom, I am pleased to note your recent activity in the Computers Workgroup. Much appreciated!Pat Palmer 16:42, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Thanks. I'll be writing more for CZ:Computers Workgroup, as well as working hard in philosophy and religion. --Tom Morris 19:15, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Are you suggesting computers are not philosophies and religions? Will you next tell me that there is gambling in Rick's cafe?

At times, I look at Mac vs. Windows arguments as rather like the more obscure theological debates such as between the infralapsarians and the supralapsarians. Now, there may be some rationality to bringing Bill Gates into a discussion of the Manichean theory. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:49, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

As someone who uses a Mac, and a PC running Windows XP and Linux, I guess that either makes me a pantheist, a panentheist or perhaps one of those atheistical unitarian types who takes scraps from anywhere, without any real metaphysical underpinnings. I tend to think of Linux as a sort of Protestantism, since you spend a lot more time with spartan command lines - with Mac OS X being more like Anglicanism. --Tom Morris 11:09, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

Boy Scouts

Shouldn't it live at Boy Scouts of America, since I believe that's the official designated name of the organization? Also, Scouting could live at it's own disambiguation page as well given that it can mean various things (war role, intelligence, camping/traditional meaning etc). --Robert W King 18:44, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Well, Boy Scouts of America should be linked from Scouting, since the BSA is part of the movement. As for the other meanings - if someone wants to step up, add them to Scouting, and then we could budge the Scouts movement to something better. (To be honest, page naming is not my main concern or forté, so feel free to shunt the articles around so that they make better sense). --Tom Morris 19:00, 30 June 2008 (CDT)

Should Comparison_of_Java_and_.NET exist?

Hi Tom, I noticed your repeated comment in the history for Comparison_of_Java_and_.NET on "not sure if this article should exist". A good place to bring up that would be on the article's talk page. I originally wrote that article as a separate entity so that I could link to it from both .NET Framework and Java platform, and I'm interested in your thoughts about it. It would certainly need updating over time as the information might not remain current.Pat Palmer 11:56, 5 July 2008 (CDT)

I do admire some of your definitions.

Semantic web is elegant.

Looking at fascism, I'd appreciate your input on an article that I just created, FUD (deliberately using a redirect rather than the full title). First, I definitely want the opinion of people not from North America; the term is recognized among my Internet engineering colleagues worldwide, but, in all senses, that's an unusual group. Second, I was struggling and failing to show the most pernicious use of FUD, in creating "enemies of the state", the struggle against which is one of the greatest social controls of fascist (and other totalitarian) states. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:44, 19 July 2008 (CDT)

Thanks for archiving

--the Write-a-Thon page. Hope this means you'll join the party when it's Wednesday in your time zone (or "jump the gun", tee hee) Aleta Curry 22:30, 5 August 2008 (CDT)

thanks for tweaking!

Tom, Thanks for cleaning up on Grounds for Sculpture!Pat Palmer 09:19, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

Web, Ajax, etc.

I agree with your comments on Ajax. Now, let me make it abundantly clear I'm a networking, not web interface, specialist. Nevertheless, I've tried to start putting in some background material, such as Domain Object Model, and cross-linking it with Ajax. Also, I put some comments on JSON - as a data interchange format.

This isn't just my computers editor hat speaking; I have to develop some better web development skills. In the meantime, do let me know what networking content you'd like to see; there's so much that it's hard to prioritize.

Howard Howard C. Berkowitz 14:13, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

Thanks, Howard. If you want to learn about front-end development with the DOM and Ajax, I'd highly recommend the books of my friend Jeremy Keith - DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model and Bulletproof Ajax. For a more programmer-oriented introduction I'd suggest Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript. All three teach JavaScript properly, a rare commodity these days.

As for networking topics, I'd love to see a page on mDNSResponder/zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour/Hello/whatever Apple are calling it this week - it's a technology I have a lot of time for.

Over the next few weeks, I'm mostly going to be working on Philosophy Workgroup articles, though I may try and turn out a few stubs and shorties on aspects of Agile development, Ruby, Rails etc. --Tom Morris 14:20, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

DNS is a challenging area, and you raise the key point of level. For example, I did start a Domain Name System article, which is a top-down start to mDNSResponder. I know I need to write about multicast in general. The question, to which I have no clear answer, is whether the effort should be principally top-down, or have a lot of individual articles that are both current and meaningful to specialists.

That's been a problem in my books on ISP engineering. Essentially, book publishing, outside narrow academic circles, is dead for networking, unless the book specifically relates to a job skill. There's enough free content for the specialists. While I've done some writing here about BGP, I've also written about it at book length and still know there's a huge body of art that exists mostly in peoples' heads and mailing lists.

While I deal a lot with addressing, much of DNS is, from my perspective, application stuff. My expertise is paving, traffic direction, and accident investigation on the Information Superhighway: the journey rather than the destination (stops and shudders at the memory of my experience of driving in the UK, with the most significant bits of the street being reversed) Howard C. Berkowitz 15:01, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

I may need to take on more Javascript, as I'll be talking, in an hour or so, to someone with whom I might work; he's got a medical SoaS application, although I don't know the software infrastructure. I have Zakas' Javascript for Web Developers on my shelf, but that's something I got as an author for Wiley. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

DNS

This is a little indirect, but a colleague of mine, User:TJ Evans, has started updating the Internet Protocol version 6 material, which has embarrassed me into doing more. In particular, I've put in a bit about dynamic DNS update -- mostly that it exists. Hopefully, there's someone better qualified than I to discuss DNS and public key infrastructure, but it's on my list if no one else takes it on.Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

A funny sort of gratitude

Thanks, in an odd way, for putting in a Dick Cheney article. In assorted military history articles, I keep feeling guilty about the previously null link to him, and, for that matter, Robert S. McNamara. I have such personal distaste for them that I just haven't been up to writing an article on them to make the links non-null.

While there's a bit of CZ politics involved with cleaning up Vietnam War, it's hard to discuss it without discussing McNamara. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:26, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

Thanks!

For the formatting on that oh so famous boy band! Later! Aleta Curry 21:49, 2 September 2008 (CDT)

PGP and related

Thanks for adding some of the legal history to PGP. I think eventually that might develop into a rather long section, with links to quite a few related things. If you're interested in the whole crypto & civil rights & ... set of issues, have a look at FreeSWAN as well. Sandy Harris 11:39, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I really should write something about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, a barmy law here in Britain which allows the Police to require me to hand over my encryption keys or go to prison for two years. --Tom Morris 11:59, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi Tom

You're going to explain why you cut 443 characters from citizen journalism, right? --Larry Sanger 16:07, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Lets go Retro!

Hey Tom--!

Whatever happened to that 1980s Retro banner you promised, huh, huh?? :) Aleta Curry 23:04, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I was planning to do it last night, but went out for a late snack at a diner. Got back about 1am, and quickly rustled something up in The Gimp on my teensy Acer Aspire One laptop. I'm no graphic designer, but I think it's rather fun. Added it to the Write-a-Thon page. Now just got to find something to put up about the 1980s. Time to put all that cartoon-watching and pop cultural engagement to use! --Tom Morris 08:22, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Mill

Hi Tom, how about 'filling out' Mill, then? Would you like some help! Martin Cohen 14:34, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Can't, I'm afraid. Too busy. Too much reading to do. With all the things I'm doing, something has to make way. Citizendium is unfortunately the thing which had to make way. --Tom Morris 21:55, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Understood! - just wanted to check to avoid 'pre-empting you'. I'll put some notes up in the next week , no problems. Martin Cohen 10:56, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

You might like to comment on my concerns about the 'Applied Philosophy' section on the Philosophy page. Martin Cohen

Cults and violence

Hi Tom. Did you just undo your revert of my deletion? [1] My head is spinning ... dizzy ... must sit down. --Ed Poor 18:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I undid your edit where you removed the paragraph about the Branch Davidians from the suicide and violence section. My reasons were simple: the Branch Davidians incident quite clearly was an example of "group suicide or violence", although not exactly in the same way that the Heaven's Gate people were (where it was sucide or violence within the group, where as in Waco it was violence from outside - namely, from the ATF). Then I realised that having a separate section for "group suicide or violence" with just Heaven's Gate and the Branch Davidians made no sense, since we had a section later on called Scandals - where both the Heaven's Gate and Waco paragraphs would slot in quite a bit better.

As an aside, I think that we will probably have to eventually split Religion in the United States to have one article talking about the history and evolution of mainstream religious groups in the US, and one to deal with new religious movements like Heaven's Gate and so on. --Tom Morris 18:29, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

How about Violence and religion - or more specifically Violence and new religions? I know a lot about it, having been shocked in 1980 by the People's Temple episode in Guyana. Media attention and rumors then suggested the Unification Church might end the same way. --Ed Poor 18:40, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Doubletake on edit summary

When I read about removing something from circumcision... Howard C. Berkowitz 22:17, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The whole thing is rather weird. Only 12% of people my age in Britain are circumcised (and the numbers only seem to be dropping). In Scandinavia, it's only 2%. In the US, the rate is over 80%. Do males in Scandinavia end up with dramatically worse health outcomes than those in the US? Cultural traditions sure are weird. --Tom Morris 22:30, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the question should be: do their sexual partners end up with worse health outcomes? Aleta Curry 02:50, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

CZ conventions about numbers

I wouldn't swear to it, Tom, but I'm pretty sure that the CZ convention is to write 19th century, etc., rather than nineteenth. On the same basis that numbers from one to ten are written, and after that they're 11, 12, etc. Or so I think. I could be wrong.... Hayford Peirce 22:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

In which case, I suggest changing the convention. I changed it because it seemed far more sensible to do it that way. --Tom Morris 22:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, I dunno if it's more sensible or not. But if there are 10,000 examples of doing it the other way, and CZ actually *says* somewhere it's supposed to be done that way, then that's how it should be done. Hayford Peirce 22:54, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I can't find anything in CZ except an exhortation to consult various Manuals of Style. In which one can generally find anything one wants if one consults enough of them. Wikipedia, however, does say this: "Centuries are named in figures: (the 5th century CE; 19th‑century painting); when the adjective is hyphenated, consider nineteenth‑century painting, but not when contrasted with painting in the 20th century." But since we're not Wikipedia.... Hayford Peirce 23:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I can probably design a template that will produce properly formatted text, no matter what convention we decide on.

• Like {{century|18}} => Template:Century

Then when we decide words are better than numbers, we just change one template and all instances of using the template change automatically. Or maybe I make an easy way to turn a noun into an adjective.

• Like {{century adj|18}} => Template:Century adj --Ed Poor 19:21, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we need a policy change rather than a technical change. Thanks for the offer. I'm going to suggest when we have time that a few CZ regulars get together, draft a rough style guide and then through a consensus based approach push it through the proposals system. --Tom Morris 21:15, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I proposed precisely that several months ago, in one of the Forums, I believe, and after about three responses it went -- absolutely nowhere. Mine was for a sort of build-it-as-you-go-along model. Ie, I would stick in a bit about modifiers and hyphens because I had just happened to make an edit about them, ie "Science-fiction writers write science fiction." And when "which" should be used instead of "that". Everyone has their own hobbyhorses to stick in, I imagine. Hayford Peirce 21:55, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

The 2 templates I created can be swapped around, if we change policy. I have no preference; I simply don't like going back to change things. I'm also a computer programmer, and so I prefer to make 100 references to a subroutine, function or template - which can then be modified in one place - rather than try to find all 100 references. (It puts me in mind of the Y2K problem or Y2K bug.) --Ed Poor 00:28, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Indenting -- please follow the rules

Hi, Tom,

Please follow the CZ indenting conventions in Talk pages, which are now set out clearly at the top of the page in the blue box. Thanks! Hayford Peirce 15:22, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think I was. I wasn't replying to Howard's statement, I was making a new top-level comment that wasn't specifically responding to anyone's comment, but to the general thrust of the thread. I've been using threaded message boards for over a decade now. If we insist that everything has to be indented a level below the previous post, then we may as well not bother with indenting, since we don't then have a threaded discussion, just a flat one with indented text blocks. (Personally, I think we should get rid of talk pages altogether and replace them with a proper USENET-style threaded discussion board.) --Tom Morris 15:31, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Understood, but it's not USENET. When I make a general comment, I create a new (sub)heading, which is not possible in a mail or news thread. While you and I may be comfortable with threading, many CZ users are not and will not be; I've used threaded message systems for a lot more than one decade.

While it's not explicitly in the rules, and perhaps should be, there is an informal convention of moving back to the left margin with (undent). That's reasonably readable. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:36, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

In the case of the pseudoscience talk page the indenting was screwed up because Howard, Tom, and I were working on it simultaneously. I didn't see Howard's nor Tom's remarks when I saved. --Paul Wormer 15:42, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think my point stands. If we're not going to use indenting for threading, then it seems pointless to indent at all - it just makes it harder to read. I'm not totally sure why we need to bother with undent. It's pretty easy to see it's 'undent'-ed, because it's not indented. I'd suggest we rethink the way talk pages work completely. Have a look at this example page from microformats.org wiki. The discussion on this issues page (microformats.org wiki doesn't use talk pages) is how I imagine an ideal talk page. One of the other things I'd change about talk pages is lack of refactoring. On the original c2 wiki, discussions were frequently refactored - packed together into compressed nuggets to make them more readable. I think Citizendium could really reinvent the humble talk page and make it a lot better than the warzone that is many of the Other Place's talk pages. --Tom Morris 15:46, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

(Edit clash with Tom, that illustrates the problem nicely) I think Paul hits the nail on the head here. Sometimes its hard to know where to add the comment if there is an edit clash. You want to reply to the comment three above but several more have appeared in the meantime. Basically it's a crap system on an active page. High activity also explains why people accidently and unknowingly delete others comments. Chris Day 15:47, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, there was a fairly long discussion about it in one of the Forums a while ago, with a number of contributors, and it appears to me that it was decided that henceforward indents would be the RULE, rather than the GUIDELINE, for Talk pages about articles. And it was left vague about what individuals could do with their OWN Talk pages. For instance, if Tom insists on using some other formatting on his own Talk page, then I don't think anyone else is going to argue with him. But for all the other articles, I think that *everyone* should follow the rules as much as possible -- I realize that there are Editing Conflicts, etc., but it still ought to be reasonably adhered to. Thanks again! Hayford Peirce 16:15, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the above indentation shows my point. My 15:46 post is in response to Howard's 15:36 post. The indentation makes it seem like it's in response to Paul's 15:42 post. But it's not. Paul's 15:42 post is in response to Howard's 15:36 post. I've therefore unindented my 15:46 post to illustrate it's relationship in a threaded hierarchy. --Tom Morris 18:11, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Tom, since this is your user talk page, please feel free to organize it any way you like. For other talk pages, specifically for those attached to articles, please follow the protocols shown in the blue box at the top of the page, and also as elaborated here at CZ:How to use talk pages. Unless I am overruled on this by, say, Larry, I am stating flatly that these are Rules to be followed, not Guidelines to be *maybe* followed. But, as I've said, your own page is your own to do what you want with. Hayford Peirce 19:00, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I kinda like the way Tom does it. There are times when you are not responding to the person just above your post and his method works for me. I think (undent) works to let people know that you are responding to the text just above. The problem is that we can't expect everyone to know one set of rules, so unless we want to bug people about this on a daily basis, I think we should allow some slack. D. Matt Innis 19:35, 4 February 2009 (UTC)