And the effect of this Quizz was...

[t00fri]

Selden,

+++++++++++++++++++++++
ok, ALL that your "wise" decision managed to effect is that a frequent and competent poster at the Physics and Astronomy board will NOT appear there anymore, answering questions of people about cosmology, extra dimensions, relativity and all that...

The "educational" and "entertaining" nature of that Quizz stuff was apparently more important to you than the numerous clarifying contributions of an internationally renowned scientist.
+++++++++++++++++++++++

Well done!

Bye Fridger

[Dollan]

Now why couldn't that have been a PM? All you're doing with a sour post like this is spreading more ill humour.

...John...

[t00fri]

Now why couldn't that have been a PM? All you're doing with a sour post like this is spreading more ill humour.

...John...

No, I am very serious about this, and have anounnced it in time! I really think this was a bad decision and people should read this.

Bye Fridger

[Dollan]

I disagree.

...John...

[t00fri]

I disagree.

...John...

You may disagree with whatever you like. The facts remain!

Bye Fridger

[Dollan]

You may disagree with whatever you like. The facts remain!

Bye Fridger

Indeed they do.

...John...

[Don. Edwards]

Ah, the continued degenerating cycle of this forum at work. It makes me give pause as to its future and well being. It also makes me wonder about a great many things. I just don't know about this forum as a functional community anymore.
I am a member of a few forums were the average age of the members is 25 and they seem to be acting allot more mature than all of this.

Please just let it end once and for all. We just don't need the forum being torn asunder like this.

Don. Edwards

[Rassilon]

Fridger,

Ive seen you as a very important member of these forums and your absence of educational and enlightened posts would be missed....

I for one understand your reasonings and know the position you stand in... I think you remember a time when I was frustrated with the outcome of the attitudes here... It seemed Chris was disinterested in Celestia and there was very little contributions on his part... Posts went unanswered... He never replied to some PM's I sent him and asumed that he could care less... In my short sightedness I decided to leave and do my own thing... I think you remember that PM I sent.... I didnt get into detail really but I learned something while I was coding my own type of Celestia that its a hell of a lot more work than I began to realise.... That I think Chris did get sick of it... The constant complaints and badgering.... Not to mention you and Christophe.... Grant left in somewhat of a spirit of frustration that things were going sour and stagnant... There were less and less interesting posts... No contributions of interest and I feel somewhat guilty for that.... Not to say I am any more important than anyone else but as I stated in another thread 'Every action has an effect on us all'.... Well the universe as a whole...

If you want to leave then leave... But leave with those good and fond memories of this place and not because someone disagrees with you.... In selden's defense he closed the thread because the argument was pointless as all arguments are.... Thier just spats much like the famed Looney Toons...

Duck season
no rabbit season
DUCK SEASON
NO RABBIT SEASON....

You get the point .... I think selden was very diplomatic in his response that such threads belong in Purgatory as does this as I well see you have started it there... As does most of my posts of levity and nonesense.... I cant say it enough... We got to laugh about things or were all going to kill each other like a savage band of bloodthirsty cannibals!

Oh one more thing... We have to show tolerance of others ideas and perceptions because without that what do we have? We have one sidedness! And in a sour and painful note in politics if we do not show restraint in our beliefs, in projecting a belief system we will end up with a holy war will we not? In a country run by power hungry individuals I feel subjected to a belief system imposed by a goup of individuals I hardly know... I feel subjected to a lack of freedom... These groups state that its to fight terror... I believe its to instill it.... Without tolerism we have a dictatorship...

[t00fri]

...
If you want to leave then leave...

Hey Ras'


I am not considering to leave the Celestia Forum. It's all about the Astronomy & Physics board. I have made clear that I will not post there anymore if this Quizz plunder does not go to Purgatory where it belongs.

Others felt similar. Selden did not. He found it "educative" and "entertaining"...


That's all.

Cheers,
Fridger

[Rassilon]

...
If you want to leave then leave...

Hey Ras'


I am not considering to leave the Celestia Forum. It's all about the Astronomy & Physics board. I have made clear that I will not post there anymore if this Quizz plunder does not go to Purgatory where it belongs.

Others felt similar. Selden did not. He found it "educative" and "entertaining"...


That's all.

Cheers,
Fridger

It doesnt make any difference if you leave there or the entire forums... You still have left in spirit....

[rthorvald]

It doesnt make any difference if you leave there or the entire forums... You still have left in spirit....

That was a good way of putting it. If you give up on one forum here, the frustration will not become less for the next one... And soon, we could just as well pack up and leave, all of us.

I guess it is not as much the occasional misplaced post, but rather that the entire forums are getting increasingly trivialized that gets to you. It would be different in a larger community i guess, where more things happen. But here, the group aren??t large enough to contain it.

Enough said; i don??t really feel the need to discuss your decicion, Fridger... It??s yours. I sympathize with your frustration, that??s all.

- rthorvald

[Malenfant]

Well, I'm sure not leaving that board. I certainly still find it useful and I try to post a lot of stuff there that people will find interesting and thought-provoking.

If you look at the threads on the first page of the Astronomy board most of them are in fact still useful, intelligent threads. I would still very much prefer that the frivolous, childish 'quizzes' and metaphysical stuff shouldn't be allowed on that board though, but at this stage they're not taking over (and it's definitely not as bad as it was a while ago when frustrations over the metaphysical/philosophical stuff boiled over).

It's sad that Fridger feels he has to leave that board to make his point, but then he's always had a talent for melodrama . At the end of the day though, if he does that then he's contributing to the 'brain drain' that he so detests. If he can live with that then that's his choice I guess. But Selden said it and I agree with him - if you want to keep the standards to your liking then you have to contribute things that you want to see. If you walk away, then who else is going to carry the torch?

Of course I realise that not everyone here is a professional. But then most of us here aren't kids either. And I can definitely see how a professor could get exasperated at the decreasing standard of the posts there, culminating in an unwanted and unnecessary and frankly puerile quiz to 'test our knowledge' by a relative outsider who hasn't contributed much that's actually mature, educational or useful.

But to be honest, I think Fridger really left the P&A board a while ago. Apart from that recent Blackbody thread, he hadn't really been posting much there anyway recently - instead he's been on Development and Users a lot.

[t00fri]

...
It's sad that Fridger feels he has to leave that board to make his point, but then he's always had a talent for melodrama . At the end of the day though, if he does that then he's contributing to the 'brain drain' that he so detests. If he can live with that then that's his choice I guess.

Consty,

about my talent for melodrama I even tend to agree with you . But let me "modestly" add that frequently this just serves as a certain foreground noise when approaching the goal that is really in my mind...

Please don't misunderstand me here. I would never want to manipulate anybody or people's opinions about something... Yet, I can sense pretty well when things are starting to move somehow. Such movements may be in rather diverse directions, ...not always desirable ones...

Take a snapshot of this forum, as of yesterday night, say. Let me enumerate a few items/events that all went through my mind at this point in time:

-- Selden's unfortunate decision to implicitly support the starting 'brain drain' in the P&A board, by not moving that Quizz stuff to Purgatory. By ignoring my request and that of others, he definitely placed a signal encouraging a certain kind of activities!

That Quizz by itself is certainly not important enough to warrant ANY noise about it! But such
posts tend to be highly "infective", encouraging others to continue with more such "entertainment".

-- Besides the coherent activities of our "educational community", the activities in the P&A board where about the only remaining ones, where people tried hard to maintain an attractively high standard of discussion and communications!

That's why this whole "act" concerning P&A became MUCH more significant! That's why I decided to become "stubborn" about this matter!

-- Chris offering to open up a new "Educational Forum"

-- Yesterday's very encouraging anouncement by RocketMan@JSC,
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... c&start=39
about further possible scientific applications of Celestia, along with my own ongoing considerations about standardizing scientific input data e.g. perhaps even towards a SPICE interface ...

-- The "growing" of CelestialMatters in relation to the Celestia Forum...

++++++++++++++++++++
All of those considerations and events are related to each other
and formed the REAL background for my argumentation.
++++++++++++++++++++

But to be honest, I think Fridger really left the P&A board a while ago. Apart from that recent Blackbody thread, he hadn't really been posting much there anyway recently - instead he's been on Development and Users a lot.

True, except I did not LEAVE it. I had taken a BREAK. As you correctly noted, I used my available time mainly for Celestia development during the recent weeks.

But when you simply select the P&A board in the Search dialog along with 't00fri' you'll find 366 contributions of mine to 110 topics since it's creation in 2003! Some of them long and tedious efforts to explain in simple terms interesting and difficult topics in modern physics. These are the facts.

Selden's unfortunate decision now has freed some of my time for further Celestia development. From now on, you'll get what our moderator finds more important than my own efforts: "educational entertainment"

Bye Fridger

[Malenfant]

Selden's unfortunate decision now has freed some of my time for further Celestia development. From now on, you'll get what our moderator finds more important than my own efforts: "educational entertainment"

Yeah, but I think you don't realise that the people who are actually going to miss you on that board are the ones who have had nothing to do with the less serious posts. By not making your expertise available there, you're basically "punishing" the people who are most interested in your contributions because of a small number of frivolous posts. The ones who actually make those frivolous posts don't give a damn whether you stay or not, because they're not the ones interested in what you have to say anyway.

I'll be brutally honest, Fridger - you really can be a drama queen about things. It's often got to the point before where you're effectively throwing a strop and blackmailing people to get what you want, and that really isn't the best way to solve these issues. It used to annoy the hell out of me, as you're well aware - but I'm telling you this in a non-confrontational way here because I'm trying to make you see that this isn't a constructive way to solve problems. I realise and fully sympathise that things built up to reach a breaking point with you here, but I don't think this is the way to reolve these situations.

If you want to just go and focus on development then of course you should go ahead and do that and nobody should try to stop you. There's no point in forcing you to stay where you don't want to be. And of course you could just do that without being explicit about it (you already had done that in practice anyway, even if you were 'taking a break'). But I don't think that you leaving the P&A board will really accomplish anything positive for those who are still using it for serious purposes (and a lot of us are).

(BTW, I've got 112 posts on the P&A board. Plus the 236 as Evil Dr Ganymede... )

[Rassilon]

BAH! Fridger your ego is like an elephant! Im telling it in a humourus way but really it does get the best of you sometimes... Would you go post something in Astronomy like some calculations to speed along my addon/editor efforts at the very least? Malenfant has helped graciously but I was BAITING you! I know you cannot resist! It will happen you will slip and post I know it

[t00fri]

BAH! Fridger your ego is like an elephant! Im telling it in a humourus way but really it does get the best of you sometimes... Would you go post something in Astronomy like some calculations to speed along my addon/editor efforts at the very least? Malenfant has helped graciously but I was BAITING you! I know you cannot resist! It will happen you will slip and post I know it

Aah....now I am understanding! It was the malitious meaning of BAITING that broke the line in my brain

It will happen you will slip and post I know it

I am afraid not. Somebody said I was stubborn .


Cheers,
Fridger

[Rassilon]

I suppose I could try reverse psychology... But does that ever work?

[Cormoran]

Reverse psychology only works if no-one mentions 'reverse psychology'

If the really smart people leave the forum, on indeed any particular section, those of us who are trying to improve our knowledge of the reality behind Celestia will have lost a valuable datasource.

Should a teacher stop teaching the willing students because a few others don't want to learn?

Just my two cents.

Cormie

[t00fri]

Reverse psychology only works if no-one mentions 'reverse psychology'

If the really smart people leave the forum, on indeed any particular section, those of us who are trying to improve our knowledge of the reality behind Celestia will have lost a valuable datasource.

Should a teacher stop teaching the willing students because a few others don't want to learn?

Just my two cents.

Cormie

Please tell this to Selden...

The present situation arose only, since he refused to remove this Quizz plunder from the P&A board. He could have contacted me by PM and I am sure we had found an acceptable solution. Notably, I would have had a chance explaining him the REAL reasons behind my recommendation (see my post above).

Instead he ignored my well reflected request as if I was a BOT from the net...

Besides myself, another professional scientist (Malenfant) and two other respected users (chaos syndrome, ElChristou) had clearly requested to move the Quizz to Purgatory.

It cannot be that a moderator without scientific training is "ruling" in the P&A board against the strong recommendations of professional scientists, supporting instead what HE thinks is "educational entertainment"...

Bye Fridger

[selden]

Please remember that this site is not only for professional astronomers. It needs to be approachable by people with little or no previous knowledge of astronomy or physics. And it needs to help those people become comfortable with astronomical terminology and information so they can be proficent in using Celestia.

Although it may not have been presented in the best way, quizes like the one Telepath posted are one way to help with this.

Unfortunately, the Celestia Forum site does not (yet?) have a Forum that would be an appropriate home for informal, fun items like this. As you know, the name "Purgatory" is quite off-putting. I'm sure that many people never read any of its threads just because of the name. Certainly there have been people who were quite upset when it was suggested that their off-topic discussions should be moved there.

Perhaps part of the problem is caused by the way I personally read the Forum. I always use the URL http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/search.ph ... d=newposts
although it sometimes misses some. I almost never notice the actual Forum where a posting has been made and can't get very excited about the occasional mis-categorized posting. Many threads discuss multiple subjects and drift away from the original intent.