User talk:Michael J. Formica

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! Larry Sanger 12:41, 4 November 2007 (CST)

Hi Michael, Sorry. I just noticed your post on my discussion page. What exactly is the problem you are having? Gary Giamboi 17.36, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Re CZ Live

You're welcome, but there I was doing the stupid part only :) Aleksander Stos 17:59, 7 November 2007 (CST)

Yoga categorization

One of the really neat things about the subpages scheme is that it automatically places articles into categories according to what is listed in the metadata template. So if you fill in "cat1" on the metadata page, the article will automatically be placed into the corresponding workgroup category. The same is, of course, true if you fill in "cat2" and "cat3" as well.

The reason that Yoga was still in the Hobbies workgroup until yesterday is that someone had typed [[Category:Hobbies Workgroup]] at the bottom of the page. This is how we managed things before the introduction of subpages, but it is no longer necessary and sometimes even gets in the way now. I removed that tag and you can see if you click on "edit" on the yoga page that there are no longer any categories listed at the bottom. "CZ Live" and workgroup categories still appear when you look at the article, because they are placed by the subpages template. In the future, you can do everything you're likely to need to do through the metadata template (unless we come up with an even better system :-)) --Joe Quick 22:03, 10 November 2007 (CST)

I understand your frustration. As far as I can tell, I'm the only person around who knows anything about most of the topics that I've been writing on (mainly anthropology of Mesoamerica). I try to branch out where I can and I've started a couple of articles that I was pretty sure others would be able to add to but people are still pretty sparse around here in the social sciences. I'll be sure to keep an eye on your contributions and jump in where I can, but unfortunately, my interest in psychology goes well beyond my knowledge of it.

As far as new workgroups go, this is something that keeps getting put on the back burner in favor of other projects. The power to create new workgroups is more or less limited to the editorial council in order to avoid an unmanageable proliferation and I hope that a resolution will be passed soon but none has come up yet. There are a whole bevy of interdisciplinary groups that I'd like to see created (cognitive studies, gender studies, etc.) but I suspect the first round of new workgroups will be limited to area studies, biography and a few others. Hopefully, this happens soon. --Joe Quick 12:27, 11 November 2007 (CST)

Pranam, Michael. IMHO, the reason we have a hard time writing a concise piece about the MAs is because MAs has become user friendly and politically correct. It is what it is, not what we want it to be. I listed lama pai only to include something from as many countries as possible. Tibetan White Crane can also be used.

I noticed you also deleted the mention of fighting to acquire mating rights. If you look at todays larger primates, the baddest dude gets the women. As many as he can keep the others away from. I am sure that tokk place in our history before we started inter-group warfare or even large scale hunting for meat.

As for deleting MAs as the driving force behind much of science, so much of what was discovered was to make one country's army better than the next one's. Everything from the Roman system of roads to metallurgy to chemistry was driven by war and in modern times, physics, metallurgy, chemistry and most everything else has been greatly influenced by military spending. If someone doesn't tell it like it is, people will keep on believing what is pleasurable. The whitewashing of our instincts will never give us a chance to rein them in.--Gary Giamboi 15.04, 12 November 2007 (CST)