Starship Asterisk*

The Asterisk Cafe' seems to be broken. After clicking on Asterisk Cafe' and putting my cursor over - 'i don't know where else to ask this', it tells me that the topic has been moved, but all the posts for that topic are still there even though they have not appeared on the index board. The index board still has the original poster listed as being the last post.

It's not broke, the topic has been moved, if you click on the link, it will take you to where the topic is.

Thanks! I must be older than i thought. I missed the word library AFTER i clicked on the Cafe'. Just file this in the 'Dumb" files as Done.

Can somebody please put the Physics X forum back into chronological order? It is very difficult to keep any kind of coherency between the lectures when they're ordered alphabetically.

Chris, how so? The lectures are to my knowledge not sequential/dependent on one another by date. IOW, there's no order to them, except those labeled this_title1, this_title2. (If I'm wrong about this, I expect RJN/SsDd will say so!)

If there are new posts on a thread, the red unread post icon appears to the left of the thread title: I think it'd be easier to find the lectures one is interested in if they were alphabetical, especially once the entire series of lectures is available. Not so? Please 'splain; thanks! (This is a serious inquiry, btw; if alpha order doesn't work for those viewing the lectures, it'd be enlightening to know why. Not that I can do anything about the order, but since the Engineering Deck works the same way, this is something I'm interested in knowing!)

owlice wrote:Chris, how so? The lectures are to my knowledge not sequential/dependent on one another by date. IOW, there's no order to them, except those labeled this_title1, this_title2. (If I'm wrong about this, I expect RJN/SsDd will say so!)

Quite a few seem to draw on information from others. Whether they are intended for chronological viewing, I don't know, but there does seem to be a logical order to view at least some of them.

I'd leave the computer codes chronological as well, since I think it's slightly easier to find ones based on my memory of when they were posted than their (generally arbitrary) names. But that's not such a big deal. Ordering a set of lectures alphabetically really makes no sense to me at all. And it is very easy to miss "new post" icons when they are floating at some random place in a list that is now longer than a single browser window on many computers. Scrolling down and searching for new material is a bit of a pain, and it's easy to miss posts this way.

Thanks, Chris; I'm still puzzled, though.

If not in alpha order, a lecture or computer code thread would float to the top of its forum whenever anyone responds to the thread. I'm not understanding how that would make it easier to find "Special Relativity II: Paradoxes," for example, once people have posted questions/comments/etc. on various threads. Essentially, the threads would be in no real order at all; they wouldn't be shown sequentially in date-of-first-posting-order, but in most-recently-posted-to order.

How would that make it easier for you to find the lecture/computer code you want in? And how would people new to the lecture/computer codes forum find anything at all, or know that there was a "Special Relativity II: Paradoxes" lecture if it had been bumped, by virtue of discussions on other threads, to the second page of that forum? (I'm scratching my head here; my apologies for my denseness.)

(I was up all night doing schoolwork, so I'm very foggy, sleepy, slow, needing a nap... at least this time, I have a valid excuse for my denseness. The rest of the time, not so much!)

owlice wrote:If not in alpha order, a lecture or computer code thread would float to the top of its forum whenever anyone responds to the thread.

Yes, I suppose that's true. I guess it's just that very few of the lecture threads have produced comments.

If indeed the lectures are intended to have a specific order (which RJN might comment on), they should perhaps be numbered and then made alphabetical.

Numbering the lecture threads was discussed and rejected.

I hope eventually both the lecture and computer code threads generate discussion. More marketing for both of these features might help, and if you (or anyone else) has ideas for how to get the word out about these resources, please share them; thanks!

Chris Peterson wrote: If indeed the lectures are intended to have a specific order (which RJN might comment on), they should perhaps be numbered and then made alphabetical.

My goal was to have these lectures be nearly independent, although series like "Double Slit I-IV" might best be viewed sequentially. One model here is the Khan Academy where people can pick and choose the topics they want without having to watch them all. Still, even there, one can't just jump to an advanced topic without knowing less-advanced stuff.

Therefore, listing them in alphabetical order is OK with me. Yes, I do make occasional comments about previous and future lectures in the videos, but I guess I get too absorbed in the presentation sequence. I will try harder to avoid that.

Still, I myself had recent trouble finding the new lectures (which I sometimes check to see how goofy I look or things I can do better in the future). One trick is to scroll down to the bottom of the Physics X page, find the "Sort by" box, and highlight "Post time". That will force your view of the Physics X forum to go back to a temporal posting order.

Actually, I am flattered that you are following the lectures, Chris! I am sure you could write a book on where I've gone wrong, but I'm having a hoot anyway, and hopefully the net sum of the lectures will be beneficial to students.

- RJN

Too bad Original Post Time isn't a sort option! Then you could have them in the order created.

bystander wrote:Too bad Original Post Time isn't a sort option! Then you could have them in the order created.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

RJN wrote:Actually, I am flattered that you are following the lectures, Chris! I am sure you could write a book on where I've gone wrong, but I'm having a hoot anyway, and hopefully the net sum of the lectures will be beneficial to students.

They are very good. As an educator myself, I get a great deal from presentations made by others. There is no better way to tune up teaching skills than to watch other teachers!

Aside from that, it is always surprising to me that I can read even a very elementary physics discussion, or watch an elementary lecture (which not all these are, of course) and learn new things. Or be introduced to a slightly different way of seeing something I already "know"; a way that makes something more intuitive, perhaps.

And finally, as an applied physicist there are many areas I studied but rarely have cause to revisit. It is enjoyable to get refreshers in these areas, especially in light of new material that hadn't been discovered when I last studied them formally.

Clicking on the "latest post" icon after the name of a forum's last poster when looking at the Board Index or Discuss listing will take you to the latest post in that forum, which might (or might not) be useful for the lecture series as lectures are added to it.

Hello,

Today's APOD page (Nov 14, 2010) is missing the title's closing tag (</title>) so some browsers are not displaying anything. google-chrome-unstable-9.0.576.0-65344.x86_64 and KDE's akregator on Linux in my case. Firefox is able to workaround the missing tag.

BTW, great site!

Thank you,
Eduardo

Greetings -- just wanted to post a quick note letting you know that the November 27th APOD page contains a minor error.

The "previous" button ( < ) at the bottom left takes viewers back to November 16th instead of November 26th.

Thanks.

That's been fixed; thanks for reporting it!

How do i find out why the computer tells me the picture that I'm trying to post is invalid? I've posted two from my computer and THIS computer has also rejected two, the last one being 2.26mb. They are all taken from the same camera, but as of now It's been a 50/50 chance of rejection. What goes on??

2.26 MB is too big for an uploaded image. Reduce the size of the image. I'm not sure what the limit currently is; it used to be 256K for uploaded images. It definitely should not be more than about 400K if you can load a file that large; the bigger the file, the slower it loads, and the slower it loads, the slower the thread loads.

Hmm...you're going to have to explain mb and k. The weird streaming christmas lights i posted are 1.66mb. the hawk picture i tried to post is 2.26mb. So somewhere between 1.66mb and 2.26mb is the 256k???? This is weird! what is "mb", what is"k". I know nothing of photograpy speak. So please explain.

beyond wrote:Hmm...you're going to have to explain mb and k. The weird streaming christmas lights i posted are 1.66mb. the hawk picture i tried to post is 2.26mb. So somewhere between 1.66mb and 2.26mb is the 256k???? This is weird! what is "mb", what is"k". I know nothing of photograpy speak. So please explain.

MB and KB are not photography-speak, they're computer-speak. They are units of measure for file size. KB stands for kilobyte and MB for megabyte. Kilo=1000; mega=1,000,000 (Actually they are powers of 2, so they should be 1,024 and 1,048,576 but for the last half-century or more we've used kilobyte and megabyte as a short form for those powers of 2 bytes and we're unlikely to change now.)

There's a thread in The Observation Deck about how to post images which gives you the suggested limts and why they exist. (The fact you may be able to break those limits doesn't mean you should.)

Rob

M = Mega (10⁶ or 2²⁰)
K = Kilo (10³ or 2¹⁰)

You got lucky when you posted your lights. The limit had been increased for testing and not reset. The size limit has now been reduced to 320 KB.

I got lucky twice. The robin picture is 1.26mb.
So then, the kb and mb refer to how much information is in the picture? And it should be kept to 320kb for faster loading for those with slower internet connections. So, that means I'm going to have to cut out a lot of my pictures to cut down on the information so the Asterisk* computer will accept them, right? And i suppose THAT is called "croping"? Do you happen to know of any FREE croping programs??

You can crop (cut out a section of the image) or just make the image smaller by reducing the size

You should have paint on your pc. It will do either.